[Coco] Bad news, good news...

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that George Ramsower may have mentioned these words:

>----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger Merchberger"
>>After almost 4 years, I've finally sparked up one of my CoCos again!
>>
>>Our local "Mega Mart" (if you can call it that) had 15" LCD TVs on sale 
>>for $188. The wifey wanted to pick up one of these critters as a "Bedroom 
>>TV." Roger was thinking "CoCo TV!" ;-)
>
>Roger,
>
>Does the manual that came with the TV tell you how many pixels the LCD has?

1024x768, same resolution as a standard 15" LCD, but has the added 
TV-flavored options.

That was one of the reasons for my suggesting it's purchase - some 15" LCD 
TVs are 800x600 or even 640x480... thereby not making it very useful as a 
backup computer monitor. Like Alton Brown, I'm not much into unitaskers[1]. ;-)

>I'm wondering if it's even worth the effort, as TELEVISION LCDs usually 
>won't have a high enough resolution(pixels) to work with a computer. Not 
>enough pixels.
>Of course, I'll betcha it works okay at 32 col.

Yea, somewhat... 40 Columns looks a lot better on my Sony Wega 27" CRT 
TV[2] than on the LCD, but I'm guessing it's due to 1) Sony TV's don't 
suck, and 2) there's slightly better blending on the phospors instead of 
"let's try to convert this weird analog signal over to 1024x768 non-blended 
pixels using crappy signal converters... ;-)

>  I've had good success in the past with B&W CRT televisions after 
> removing the low-pass filter in the video ckt and going straight into 
> that section with the video.(coco2).
>  I could see clearly each pixel from the coco.

Yea, but if I wanted B&W, I'd have a Model 1 or a Mac Classic...
;-) (especially since I have a CM-8 in the attic - this little project is 
primarily supposed to be a room-saving feature... while getting back into 
my CoCo hardware.)

Well, I suppose I should head up to the attic & see if I can find some 
joysticks, and maybe the ol' floppy setup... I suspect if the kiddies are 
going to keep interest in the CoCo, I'll need a few games...

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

[1] Having been weaned on OS-9 Level 1, and shortly thereafter Level 2, 
MS-DOS was a *major* disappointment to me... ;-)

[2] I, of course, had to try it... and now the kids, who used to fight over 
using my wife's Linux box, now fight over the CoCo3... They're having a 
ball with it, and my wife (who usually complains about the computer 
clutter[3]) is liking it because

[3] which is odd, as she's blissfully unaware of her *own* clutter, which 
is quite a bit worse than mine... :-/

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????