if you have any vintage pcs or graphics cards from the mid-1990s or earlier you
may have noticed something about their video output connector that can make them difficult
to connect to a more modern display and that is the vga output connector may be missing
one of the pin sockets so right there it's pin nine and on some older vga graphics cards and
computers with built-in vga graphics where that pin goes may be blocked off
if you have a period appropriate monitor to go with that computer that's not a problem because
their vga connector is missing that pin 9 as well as two other pins in this case so you can
just plug it in and it works but any monitors or video cables made since about the mid-1990s
are likely to have all the pins present which means if you try to plug this into
a graphics card that has that blocked off pin socket it's not going to fit
when ibm invented the vga graphics standard and introduced it with their ps/2 series of
computers in 1987 they gave it that high density 15 pin video connector
even though they didn't need all those 15 pins but with the development of plug and play
in the mid-1990s that previously unused pin 9 on the vga connector is now used for a 5 volt
dc power output to power an eprom chip in your monitor so that the computer can identify
which make and model it is even if the monitor is not turned on
but to solve this problem of trying to use an older graphics card which has that pin
blocked off with a newer monitor whose cable has all the pins present there's a couple different
ways you could solve the problem one is you could try to remove that pin from this video connector
or if it's removable you could swap out the video cable to the monitor for an older one
which does not have that pin present like this one but that's not a good idea because then you would
lose that ability for a newer graphics card to identify the monitor even when it's not turned on
so i think the best solution is the one i'm going to do in this video
and that is to punch out this hole allowing the connector to fit
the only two tools you'll need to perform this modification are a lighter and a large
size paper clip just make sure you get plain paper clips and not the candy coated ones
now we just have to unfold the paper clip and i'm sure you've already figured it out but we're going
to use the heat from the flame to heat up the tip of the paper clip and then we're going to
use it to melt the hole in the vga connector to create that pin socket for the missing pin nine
actually i'm going to use a candle because i don't want to waste my lighter fluid
and there is the xga-2 card mounted in a vise because we'll need to apply some pressure to
melt that hole so it's good to have something to hold it and likewise you'll need something
to hold the paperclip because obviously it's going to get hot and you don't want to burn your fingers
so i'm going to use the candle to heat up the tip of the paper clip the
very tip of the flame is the hottest part so that's what you want to aim for
it does take a while
i'm sure you could use some other method of heating up the paperclip like a soldering iron
but this is what i'm using
okay let's see if that's good enough to melt the hole
it
may take several tries
because we used the candle flame it has some soot on it so i'm just going to clean this and see the
result of our work i think you can see we now have a hole there where there was none before
so the test will be to get a vga connector with all the pins on it and see if it fits
here's our modern vga connector for all the pins on it and let's see
yep fits right on you can even screw on the retaining screws so that was a successful
easy modification just heat up a paper clip with a candle or a lighter or whatever you
want to use and melt the hole in the connector
there's a closer look at the finished product and i'd say that's pretty darn good
now i just need to put this xga-2 card back in the ps/2 and see how it works
first i'm just testing it with the original ibm crt monitor
right now it's running windows for workgroups 3.11 if we go into the control panel for the xga card
this monitor is limited to 640 by 480 at 60 hertz there 60.1 hertz non-interlaced
but i can bump it up to 64,000 colors although i don't really have any need
for that so i just leave it on 256 but now with that modified vga connector i can use a modern
flat panel lcd monitor and get much higher resolutions and refresh rates
now i have it connected to a 19 inch 1280x1024 resolution lcd monitor i chose a custom display
with the biggest size they offered in the list 21 inches now we have a much greater
array of resolutions to choose from still the standard 640 by 480 at 60 hertz which
is what we're using right now we could bump it up all the way to 75 hertz now although
with lcd there's really not that much benefit to those higher refresh rates
and you won't be able to see it on this video anyway so i won't bother going above 60 hertz
but we can try 800 by 600 at 60 hertz non-interlaced
we could still do 64,000 colors at that resolution but again i'll just choose 256
and i'll have to restart windows so i'll be back in a second at 800 by 600 resolution
here we are at 800 by 600 maybe you can see that the size of the windows and text got
smaller because of the greater resolution but we'll still try higher here 1024 by 768 again
we can go all the way up to 75 hertz but i'll choose 60 hertz at this resolution we're limited
to 256 colors but like i said that's still plenty for windows 3.1 and again we'll have to restart
now we're at 1024 by 768 and the first thing i noticed is that at this resolution it switched
to the large fonts which are much less pixelated looking so there it is 1024 by 768 256 colors
large fonts we can even do extra large fonts
and we can go all the way up to 75 hertz although with this lcd monitor you wouldn't notice it
the next resolution on the list is very non-standard 1104 by 828 i've never heard of
that and then interestingly it supports a true 4:3 aspect ratio of 1280 by 960 instead of the more
common 1280x1024 which is the next on the list but this monitor is natively 1280x1024 so that's why
i'll try although we're limited to only 16 colors and it's only interlaced at this high resolution
so i don't know how well this monitor will support the interlaced video but i'll give it a try
uh oh it doesn't like that "input signal out of range
change settings to 1280 by 1024" which is what we're using but 60 hertz i think it's
seeing that interlaced video at twice the actual refresh rate so it was like 44 hertz
interlaced which is 88 hertz if you count both fields so that's why this monitor is
not playing nice with it it sees it's above 60 hertz and it just doesn't want to display it
and there's no 15 second timeout with this version of windows so i'll just need to
blindly exit out and then run setup from dos to get back to a standard vga driver and
start back at a lower resolution
okay so the way you get out of windows 3.1 without seeing the screen is you press
alt F4 and then hit enter and that'll get you back to dos so now we can go to
the windows directory and run setup from dos and let's see what our options are here see
there's the xga 2.12 driver but doesn't specify a resolution so i'll just set it to standard vga
and now if i start windows it should work fine now i'm back to standard vga so if i
go into this xga setup it just says it requires you to use the xga driver so now i exit out of
that i go to windows setup from within windows and hopefully if i change it back to xga it'll
default back to 640 by 480 instead of trying to use that too high of a resolution for this monitor
nope it just went back to that 1280 by 1024 at that interlaced frequency which
this monitor doesn't like you're kind of stuck here unless i go into the system.ini
file and try to change the settings manually
just as i suspected it's in the system.ini file under the category xga display you can
see horpixel and verpixel so i'll change that to 640 and 480 for frequency 44.7 was that interlaced
frequency didn't like so i think it said 60.1 so i'll do 601 and hopefully that will work
so yep just like i specified manually in that file we're at 640 by 480
60.1 hertz non-interlaced although i can bump it up to 256 colors so i can do that
actually i didn't notice it selected the large fonts even at 640 by 480 so
everything is rather comically large on the screen now so i'll need to set that back to
small fonts 256 colors at 60 hertz 640 by 480 and restart once again
and just to prove that we're getting our money's worth here is a 256 color
image using the xga-2 card in windows 3.1 but not for long because i'm going to be putting
something different on this machine soon something that according to ibm
was a better dos than dos and a better windows than windows os/2 warp version 3.
"anybody got the dos 6 out there? okay most people tell me out of dos 6 they're getting
620 630k which is pretty darn good and they're happy but then they load in their lan drivers
and then they load in their mouse drivers and their other TSRs and stuff and it takes it down
i have all my lan drivers loaded i have all my drivers loaded out of 640k here what i'm doing
is a shell out of wordperfect in this box out of 640k i have 753 not bad out of 640 huh not bad"
"one of the pc magazines said we blew it because we didn't give the capability of doing alt control
delete to get rid of a bad dos session no, i'm sorry, we came up with a new concept it's called
a menu you select close it says are you sure and it says yes"