New monitors on old machines

[Ethan Dicks]

On 11/3/06, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote:
> Wasn't there a lot of slop in the supposedly RS-170 that
> many 70s-80s computers were generating?  There's the spec,
> and then there's the just-good-enough signal they'd generate
> by any hack that looked good on the expected type and quality
> of output monitor.

I've had that issue with the stock CDP1861 "Pixie" output from an
Elf/VIP/etc... works fine on an older analog B&W monitor, but fails to
produce a picture on anything resembling a modern RS-170-capable
monitor (modern in this case is made after, say, 1985).

Don't have a solution to that except to keep an ancient RCA mono monitor around.

-ethan