In March my C128's glorious 1902A monitor went black. My friends believe its flyback has bad solder joints, which is a fixable problem. But when it comes to monitors I get very nervous. So before trying to take it all apart and wonder if I'm "doing it right" I looked in my storage for a backup monitor to use in the meantime. After some brief research, I determined my 1084S monitor could work in both 40 and 80 column modes if I had the right cables. Which I didn't. Turns out these are not very common. (For 80 cols I needed a male/male RGB cable since now both the monitor and C128 have female ports.)
When I got back from a trip to Texas late last night, there was a small pile of things I’d ordered waiting for me on my dining table. In the pile was that very special cable, which came all the way from England. It took me several minutes to figure out how to enable 80-column mode (it’s not nearly as obvious as with the single-buttoned 1902A). But after a lot of trial and error, I finally got it to work.
Two interesting things about the 1084S that are quite different than the 1902A.
1) The color brilliance and brightness are much more subdued on the 1084S in 80-column mode. That really surprised me. (Of course it’s 40-col mode far outshines the 1902A - no contest). On a black screen in BASIC, some characters actually create bizarre, faint yet very long horizontal ghosting almost across the entire screen.
2) The colors are completely “off” with GEOS. When I saved my Gateway desktop color scheme during my original setup, the desktop was a deep navy blue. When I launched it today it was now deep red.
?!
Moving the color adjustment wheel on the front panel of the 1084S made no difference to what I saw on the screen. I wound up going into Gateway’s control panel prefs and picked a completely different color scheme.
So is the 1902A the “correct” color, or the 1084S? I'd bet my life that the 1902A is truly correct. I believe (know) the 1084S colors are wrong because when I launch Gateway/GEOS, the first weird static screen we always see on boot is red instead of gray. Not slightly red or pinkish, but true red. It’s super strange.
However, since GEOS is essentially a b/w experience I can find a preference that gets me there after the deskTop loads. In reality, I’m probably picking some very strange color combination, but under the current circumstances it looks mostly normal. And it is very crisp, which is important.
I wonder if the new 80-col cable I got has some wires crossed that makes the colors all wacky, even though the actual graphics look crisp and clean?