a friend of mine gave me an amiga A500 the other day, but being a bastard, he wouldnt give me the scart rgb commodore monitor to go with it:'(
and because this is australia, scart is rare as hell, so i cant really use the amiga. i know other people who use amigas on regular monitors, but can the A500 be used on a regular monitor? its pretty oldskool isnt it?
how would i go about building a cable, what pins should i use and are there any extra components required?
Amiga pinouts should be readily available - check google (or even this pathetic site (http://www.gamesx.com/hwb/co_AmigaVideo.html)).
AFAIK Amigas don't do VGA, certainly not for regular use (games etc). You'd need an RGB encoder or an upscan convertor (or a 15kHz monitor).
the pinout in the hardware book has digital and analogue rgb, whats with that? whats the difference?
(im gonna ask someone i know how he got his amiga going on his monitor)
The difference would be how its sent. On analogue RGB a certain brightness in red (or green or blue) would be sent by a certain voltage. In digital RGB a series of bits are sent containing the brightness information. In this case however, it might be so that you could possible use a CGA\EGA monitor with your Amiga. This is however a wild guess.
You wouldn't want to use digital, even if you could or had a digital RGB monitor. Your games and other worthwhile things that you would use your Amiga in order to see do not use that kind of display. Just wire up the analogues and you'll be fine.
I had no idea SCART was a rarity in Australia, by the way. Seems I always get some of my better deals on SCART equipment from someone down under.
As everyone else has suggested, ignore the digital lines. They represent a TTL version of the video signal, so if you have an old TTL monitor, you can look at an amazing 16 colour display...
Analog is what you really want, but to connect to a VGA monitor you need a converter.
Endymion, maybe you get better deals on scart stuff from australia, because nobody can get rid of is due to the fact that about 0.1% (or less) of tv's here support it. i have only ever seen one or two which didnt cost $5000 and have vga, dvi, scart, everything (those huge ass hdtv's).. i dont have $5000, or even $500.. especially not just so i can play around with this amiga..
You have two options...
- get an old multiscan monitor that supports 15KHZ scan rate (I saw a list somewhere... will have to see if I can dig it up) Look up the pinouts & connect wires as needed
- get an adapter to let you use RF/coax (I still have one if you're interested) - these can also be modded to output S-VHS
- well I guess you have a 3rd option... try & find a Commodore monitor
For info, try searching on English Amiga Board (http://eab.abime.net/) ... really good resource for all things Amiga related.
In the meantime, you COULD squint at the horrible onboard B&W composite. It's really nasty, but it's better than nothing.
i picked up a couple of commodore monitors. but even before that, i was planning on building an rgb to composite converter box.. i have the chip, i just need some parts to go around it.