VOGONS


First post, by Jo22

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Hi everyone,

I was thinking about installing a broken laptop into a 19" chassis for a hobby project.

Since the old hardware has a VGA port on its motherboard, I wondered what to do with it.

Or more precisely, I asked myself: Should I install a VGA connector on the back of the 19" chassis ? - I doesn't look very professional!

So I sat down and thought about my childhood and the old equipment of my dad, who was (is) an IT professional.. 🤔

Then, I remembered the BNC connections on the back of his 20" VGA monitor!
A special 5x BNC to VGA cable was used to connect to the Trident 8900 in his 386DX-40 PC.

Now I wonder: Since many of us/you suffer from bad VGA video quality, how about switching to 5x BNC?

Wouldn't it solve a lot of issues?
New VGA cards could substitute the VGA port for 5x BNC connectors.

Wouldn't that be funny? 🙂

Sure, things like monochrome monitor detection and DDC would be lost.
But who needs them on DOS era systems, anyway?

Please feel free to comment below.

Best regards,
Jo22

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"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 1 of 5, by Tiido

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When one end is still a VGA connector, the benefits are not overly big, and you only see them at the very highest of resolutions too and only if all else is right. BNC on both ends is able to give better result as the impedance matching is more tightly controlled, but usually you still have VGA on one end and reflections etc. can happen. You can also get ghostsless and ringingless image out of just VGA to VGA connection if both the card, cable and monitor itself are competent.

One can also totally forget DIY stuff, high resolution video is very unforgiving, RF voodoo territory... Just 10 cm of excess cable with your best soldering work can still make ghosts and ringing if you start going past 640x480... It is one reason why video cable was not detachable from the monitor, the cable itself had the specific length etc. for optimum for the particular monitor.

Benefits of BNCs should be quite lost for most DOS applications since majority of it is "low resolution" where the limitations are not apparent to begin with. But when you get to 1600 x 1200, a good cable and connection is mandatory, and stuff beyond that is very unforgiving but those are not your typical DOS application territories luckily 🤣

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 2 of 5, by pentiumspeed

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I made apple cable out of completely disassembled quality VGA cables, end to end and correct connectors for using Mac IIci, LC II/III and a hacked the tired apple CRT by boosting the heaters by extra a turn on the flyback transformer, and there was no noise at all, just clean. Was just playing with them but no longer have any apple stuff now.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 3 of 5, by Jo22

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Thank you for the replies so far! 😃

Yes, the idea was to use BNC both ways, with 75 Ohm coaxial cables.

If a CRT monitor is used, it can be modded. Similar to how the console enthusiasts drill holes
into their vintage consoles to install RCA/Phono/Cinch plugs.

The cables themselves can be of commercial nature.

How about crosstalk? I know that most quality things degraded over the years,
the more standards shifted from industrial/medical to consumer hardware.

Like for example, RS-232 or Centronics (Parallel).:

RS-232 via DB25 has had mass lines for each data line, whereas modern DE9 mixes everything together.

In turn, Centronics had better mechanical stability than DB25.. It also had clamps.

In case of 5x BNC, it each information pin is encapsulated by a mass line (the coaxial braid).

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 4 of 5, by Tiido

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Crosstalk between the RGB lines only manifests as very minor reduction in saturation at signal transitions (all channels gravitate toward each other), any competent cable is not going to exhibit anything that you can actually notice. H and Vsync change their state outside the image area so it isn't a problem at all. In theory DDC/EDID lines can cause some sort of faint interference pattern in the image, but that requires some active polling and I don't think there's any video driver out there that does that outside initial monitor detection by the OS etc. Any good VGA cable has the indivdual RGB lines shielded and using a foil too, with isolation aswell, just like separate BNCs would more or less. The only place where BNC will win is at the connectors themselves, the signal is interrupted less on the RF level. But to keep the impedance matching, things have to do so past the cable as well, in the electronics side of things and this is still RF voodoo which you will not get right by just soldering some cables from connectors to another place in the monitor.

I highly suggest not trying to modify the monitors, and especially the better ones, you're far more likely to make things far worse than get any improvements. When the cable is attached to the monitor permanently, it is done for a reason. It will be properly impedance matched (this also includes the PCB itself in the monitor) and when you go about adding BNCs etc. you will break it and are most likely going to see reflections and in worst case oscillations (seen as brightish streaks after text and other high detail things) in the image. And this is mostly a problem of high resolutions (more than 1024 x 768), if all you do are DOS games in their 320/640/720 x 200/240/400/480 it probably never manifests and cable is not gonna be the limiting factor, even a 15" monitor is often enough for a good image though sometimes fuzzy one... Tuning the focus pot is gonna get one much more tangible result in those cases than mucking with a cable ever does. If you do actually see ghosting and streaking you have a transmission problem at hand, but it is most unlikely one will be abel to get it fixed up.

My 21" Nokia had its cable cut off when I first received it from the recycling center. I actually gave it a proper VGA input like LCDs do but the end result had significant reflections in the image noticable at high resolutions, especially noticable right after some text sort of seen as ghosts of the characters. There clearly was an impedance mismatch coming from the cable aspect itself, those 10cm I had from neckboard to the opening at back were all that was needed to ruin all the high resolutions and all I could do was merely make it less bad with better shielding and grounding or better bits of cable. In the end I fixed it by stealing a cable from a lesser monitor in its entirety. After that I got perfect image, even in 2560 x 1600. Only thing I did not try was to do some active termination at the connector side of things, it could have made a more positive difference but in the end at hundreds of MHz bandwidth, a wire no longer is just a wire 🤣. RF is magic 🤣

A big fancy monitor is already doing everything right unless something is really wrong. I had a 19" monitor that oscillated like crazy when you went above 1024 x 768, text started having long bright streaks after it. It could have been fixed by adding some tuned damping networks on the RGB lines at the neckboard but I ended up getting a different better monitor anyway soon after. Now I wish I still had it around (though since my move, I had to leave behind two really nice 17" monitors too, only my 21" could be taken with me to Norway)...

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜