The weirdest transcoder ever.

[kitty666cats]

https://youtu.be/_ZQ7Aw_jUmI?si=QX6B2Ui_r0N0inv7

This thing is ridiculous and insane. I suppose it could have a use case such as repurposing an old CGA/EGA monitor that would otherwise been deemed obsolete for some business as a security monitor (forget if he theorizes this in video or I read someone else make that guess).

But knowing the cost of things like this back in the day when they were brand new, that doesn’t seem economical at all!

I saw one of these listed on eBay ONCE. If any of you are morbidly curious, I’ll be sure to bump this if I ever see one again

[orange808]

I wouldn't call that transcoding. That's video processing--and it has very little practical modern use case for any of us. The signal is damaged when we force the colors into CGA's predetermined pallete.

The best option for repurposing a CGA monitor is physical hardware modification. You can remove the "digital" decoder circuit and establish direct analog RGB input to the monitor. That's the only way to do it. It's a lot of work, though.

Something like this is still useful when a person is emulating a PC, because common emulation hardware platforms don't output "digital" CGA. Could also be used for Apple 2 emulation with slightly wrong colors. No color damage, because the platform we are emulating has the same color characteristics as the video processor output. Also useful for digital C128 video.