CompuServe Messages

Brent: Yes, the new chipset ONLY provides 15.75khz and 31.5khz modes. The 1280 horizontal mode is provided, strangely enough, in the 15.75khz mode. As I recall, the video controller has two parameters: Dot clock, and scan rate. If you set the dot clock to slow, and the scan to slow, you end up with the normal 640 wide display that a 1084 monitor can display. If you set the dot rate to fast, and the scan rate to fast, you end up with a 31.5khz 640 pixel wide screen in non-interlace that only a multisync (or bi-sync) monitor can display. However, if you set the dot clock to fast but the scan rate to slow, you end up with a 1280 dot wide 15.75khz screen. In interlace, this could be a 1280 x 400 screen max. Note that I am not including overscan as part of this for simplicity's sake. Also note that it's been awhile since I've perused the docs. ;^) I've also heard you can get 800 pixels vertically, but I haven't thought enough about that to figure out how. As far as a monitor goes, once you have determined that it can handle the video sync rates you can start considering things like dot pitch, convergence, geometric distortion, color saturation, etc, etc.. I honestly don't know what the best monitor at ~ $500 is. I think Steve Ahlstrom has an IMTEC he is very fond of, and we use Mitsubishi AUM-1381's at work (which have nice color saturation and a NTSC composite input as a bonus!). I have heard really good things about the NEC 3D, but I believe that's about $100 too high (at least). I guess the best thing to do is go out and look at a bunch of them locally, if you can. Ariel