Rainbow on eBay and looking...

[Jeffrey Armstrong]

The Rainbow does operate at standard TV rates, i beleive.  The monochrome 
signal is actually a straight composite signal, meaning, if you build an 
adapter, you can connect any old composite monitor to it.  I used a 
Commodore 1084 (I think that's the model...) for a while.

One of the oddest features was that you could switch to European rates at 
any time through the bios.  Just press F3 while the system was on to get 
to the Set-Up screen.  One of the flags was 'Frequency' and it presented 
two options: 50Hz and 60Hz.  Just flip the flag depending on your 
continent, and you're all done.

The high-res graphics mode was 800x240, which does seem a bit wide.  Maybe 
the engineers predicted the coming of widescreen monitors... ;)

Low-res graphics mode was a more normal ratio at 384x240.

The Rainbow in the auction looks nice, but there is no color monitor in 
the pictures.  Is the seller sure that he has a color monitor?

jba at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org