I came across a Video 7 Enhancer IIe card, which appears to be an RGB and 64k card. I can't find much info at all on this card. I know Video 7 made a combo card like this. But it had a DB15 socket, while this has a 9 pin (and an RCA jack). It's also much smaller than pictures I can find of the other Video 7 card. I was able to find a picture of the inside of the Enhancer IIc, and the manual for it. It looks like they share the same connectors, 2 position dipswitch, and (custom?) IC. It's just labeled "WAFERSCALE" and a couple numbers that don't seem to mean anything.
Assuming this is essentially the same thing, it should be putting out TTL RGB/RGBi/CGA (whatever you prefer to call it). The IIc manual gives a pinout, and that pinout seems to match what a Commodore 1902 or 1084 (of which i have both) expect for RGBi (1&2 - GND, 3 - R, 4 - G, 5 - B, 6 - Intensity, 7 - N/A, 8 - Hsync, 9 - Vsync). Using my DMM, it does appear that pins 1 and 2 of the DB9 connector go to ground on the card. So I suspect this pinout matches the IIc. It should also mean the RCA jack is a monochrome output. I did confirm that is the case with my Colormonitor IIe. The dipswitches should control the color of the monochrome output. But I only got white no matter what I set them too (but it is a nice sharp white).
Does anyone have any info or a manual to back up my assumptions? I spent a while googling and kept coming up with nothing.
Thanks!
There are a few old auctions on Worthpoint. One of them points to Dr. Stephen Buggie as a seller. If you know how to reach them, they might have some information for you. Another auction has a few scanned pages from the manual including these bullet points. I stopped looking at that point. You might find more.
Thanks for that snippet, it really does look like functionally this is the same as the IIc unit, just internal and with 64k memory. Last night right before bed I decided to hook it up to my 1084, since this did seem identical to the IIc version. And it worked. I only really tried the MECC inspector, so I need to play around with it some more. But surprising (to me anyway) the image is both better, and worse.
In the better department, colors are more vivid and solid without the typical vertical lines seen in composite. But the blooming/fringing artifacts around text actually seem worse. I've also noticed a few color quirks. Like the lone green line at the left hand side of the blue color bar. On the MECC splash screen, I saw a little bit of that happening too. I have a IIgs, but never really use it to run 8bit software. I guess the next time I have it out of storage, I can see if this MECC image looks the same when it outputs it on it's RGB monitor. Re-reading the manual again, I see that the dip switches are to change the text color on the RGB display (which it does, when I booted this up I was greeted to some blue text). When I first skimmed it, my mind must have read that as changing the color of the monochrome output. But the monochrome output is always gray. I'll play around with it a little more after work tonight and see how it looks with other software.
IMG_5182.JPG
Thanks for posting that image. The green line artifact is very interesting. I've been studying different RGB schemes used by Apple IIs but it's difficult without any real RGB hardware of my own. I'd be very interested to see the 16-shade monochrome produced by the lo-res color bars if you have the ability to show it.
Is this the color bars you are looking for? I had my Colormonitor IIe connected to the RGB card's mono out at the same time as the 1094 connected to RGB. Also, its hard to see, but the monochrome display has a slight distortion near the lower left. It only seems to happen when large color displays are up, like displaying bars like htis. On another note, I happened to have my IIgs out tonight. The MECC screen looks clearer in RGB there then with the video 7 card. And the blue bar doesn't have the errant green stripe.
Colorbar RGB.jpg
Colorbar Mono.jpg
Brilliant. Many thanks.
Really cool stuff!
I am one of the lucky few with a TTL RGB monitor, but I've never looked to see if any of the cards which allow an Apple II to output this are recreated or recreatable. I agree the IC on this on first glance looks like a custom. I wonder if such a card can be built from available / period components.
I would love it if someone (or me, if I ever got around to it...) modified the A2VGA codebase for 15K Analog RGB. Even that would be nice :)
There is an open source analog RGB/scart 80col 64k card:
https://oshwlab.com/yannick.erb/a2e_80col_rgb_copy_copy
Because SCART is the designed output, the sync line has a 1k resistor to attenuate it. But if you wanted to use it with a monitor that needs TTL sync for analog RGB (like the Commodore 1084 that can do both digital and analog RGB with TTL sync) you could just put a 0 ohm resister in its place.
The Waferscale (WSI, later acquired by SGS-Thomson) 1004 might be described in one of these data books:
http://www.bitsavers.org/components/waferscaleIntegration/_dataBooks/