EU

[Tony Duell]

> 
> > Wait--you had to buy a modulator for the CGA.  When I saw the 80x25 text
> > display of the CGA (on an IBM monitor), I decided that color wasn't for me.
> 
> WHY?
> It has a phono jack on the outside for NTSC; just connect that to a cheap
> B&W CCTV monitor.

Incidentally, some clonne CGA cards didn't have the phono socket, but had 
the composite signal on pin 7 of the DE9 connector. Worth checking for it 
there anyway.

> 
> It ALSO had a 4 pin (minus one for keying) berg plug on the inside that

This was, of course, also used to connect the internal monitor of the 
PortablePC.

> was exactly right for a SupRMod][, but why degreade the signal by RF'ing
> it, and then tuning it back in?
> 
> 
> > One thing that held the wholesale adoption of color back was the generally
> > lousy quality of the CRTs available at the time.  Most were designed for
> > broadcast viewing and had a very coarse dot pitch which made things like
> > text unpleasant  to read.
> 
> B&W was substantially better.  (Mode 2)

IIRC, you could turn off the colour subcarrier, etc using a bit of one of 
the output ports (I think this was done in Mode 2), this was worth doing 
if you used a mono mnonitor. And I seem to rememebr you could get an 
extra 4 colour palette on the RGB (DE9) output if you did this.

-tony