[rescue] ECL to VGA and pinout (anoybody experience with TenoxVGA + Sun2?)

[Chris Hanson]

I believe the manual for the TTM194 has the pinouts for both ends of its cable, I'll see if I took a pic of the page(s) if you can't find a copy online, otherwise I can probably dig it out this weekend.

I'm almost certain that I saw the DE9 input on the TTM194 was identical to the DE9 input on the Sun ECL displays (and I'm assuming the Sun cabling is straight-through), so it makes sense that the TenoxVGA would work for a Sun-2 as well.

It's unclear (to me) what you mean by "a sort of vague raster," are you getting an image that's just too far over, or something else? If you connect directly to a CRT or reasonable multisync panel (eg NEC 1990SX), do you get a reasonable image? It could just be that some fine-tuning is needed, perhaps even just with the Extron. It could be that it's detecting the overall resolution correctly, but maybe the specifics of the timing are slightly different between Sun's ECL and RGB implementations, e.g. different size front/back porch, and that's confusing it.

Incidentally, my conspiracy theory about why Atari chose ECL for the mono high-resolution monitor is that they probably got a deal on the mono CRT assemblies from the manufacturer because mono and grayscale were end-of-life for the workstation vendors who had previously been buying them... Hence why even the pinout is identical. (It'd also mean Atari could have prototyped the TT using readily-available Sun displays, without having to wait for their own to be ready.) Anyone with both a working Sun ECL monitor and an Atari TT want to check how they work together? :)

  -- Chris