[rescue] Recommended 13w3 to VGA adapter

[Mouse]

>> What is the Recommended 13w3 adapter to VGA adapter these days to use with $

I don't know.  My own experience is that the adapter makes little
difference (the framebuffer and the monitor matter more), but I haven't
tried very many.  I've always thought of the adapter as a completely
passive device, so it "shouldn't matter".

>> and I got a few LCD monitors around both in 4:3 and 16:9, which is gonna be$

The one that works. :-/  It's hard to say much more without trying
them.

Part of the problem is a change of design philosophy.

Back in the '80s and much of the '90s, back in the heyday of CRT
monitors, the computer generated the video signal and the monitor was
expected to handle it, or, if it couldn't, to at least fail gracefully.

But then there was a pardigm change.  My impression has always been
that it happened with the shift to flatscreens, but I don't know
whether that's accurate, though it did happen at roughly the same time.

In the new paradigm, the _monitor_ specifies what the video signal is
to look like (via DDC or EDID or whatever it's properly called) and the
_host_ is expected to adapt.

An old monitor on a new system, then, leaves the computer wondering
what it should generate, but if it picks something there at least is a
reasonable chance it will work.

But a new monitor on an old system - such as a flatscreen on a
SPARCstation from the 32-bit pizza-box era - is a disaster.  Each end
thinks it is the end who is supposed to specify what the video signal
looks like.  I've been frustrated trying to get the cg14s in my SS20s
to drive 1920x1080 monitors.  I've succeeded for two monitors

: Asus-VH236H 780 438 3c 8d9ee20 5e 0f 5e 0f 5e 0f ;
: LG-27EA33V 780 438 3c 80befc0 c0 3 130 2e 40 1 ;

but completely failed with a third.  (Those are the mode-setting words
I've found worked for me for cg14s with those two makes-&-models of
monitors.  I don't recall the make-&-model of the monitor I failed
with.)

This is where the video hardware becomes relevant.  Some framebuffers
from Suns of that era have relatively limited ability to adapt the
signals they generate.  Some have only a handful of different dot-clock
frequencies available, for example; the cg14 apparently can't handle X
resolutions that aren't multiples of 32 pixels, as another example.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B