I've done the VGA mod, and I selected 800x600. I think it could be very useable, but there is one hitch- I can't get the verticle size to be small enough. I was expecting, a la the 575 SVGA hack, that the menu bar would be distorted, which it is. But the overall picture is out of proportion- too tall for how wide it is, even with the "VH" adjustment at minimum size. All this time people making the effort to *expand* the visible area, and here I am having trouble contracting it! Is there any kind of mod that might take care of this?
I'm going to upload a screen shot, but I'm not sure how to embed it into a forum post like this. Look in my photo gallery if I can't get it to show here.
Screenshot here
Looking at your screenshot, I'm surprised you've gotten it to look as good as you have. I've never been able to get the display as wide as that at 800x600, without some severe distortion on the edges.
You might be able to get some more horizontal width out of the display by installing a capacitor at C26 on the analog board, as detailed in the CC FAQ. As for vertical height, I imagine the only way to reduce it any further would be to mess with some voltages on the analog board. Since all the effort with modded CC screens has been put toward expanding the horizontal display area, I'm not sure where you could look for info on reducing the vertical display area. Sorry.
Matt
Thanks, those are good ideas. Although I had to pull in the horizontal a little bit from VGA mode to eliminate the horizontal bowing, I was basically happy with that width. If I can spread the screen out with the CL26 capacitor it probably still won't be completely in proportion but it would probably be more acceptable. The other idea your post gives me is to see what the "VH" pot's range is and if I can replace it with one that goes down further. I'll probably try the capacitor first. This was my first ever VGA mod, so I want to try the known before I venture off on my own.
I was only doing 640 x 480 on my last CC mod, but I had trouble getting an acceptably larg viewing area and the CL26 mod gave me horrible screen jitters - at least with the caps I had on hand.
I gave up and converted my VGA mod to the hi-res mod. That may work for you, if you can live with the theoretical extra stress on the analogue board.
It might have been you used the wrong type of cap??
All my attempts at SVGA failed with abominable geometry.
Stuart
I will also add that I've never tried the capacitor mod to widen an 800x600 display because on every CC I've tried at 800x600, the picture was unacceptably fuzzy at that resolution. I assume this fuzziness was because, as Stuart has said in the past, the CRT's dot-pitch probably isn't fine enough to display that resolution sharply.
So what I'm saying is that I don't need the headache (literally!).
Matt
I asked before but no one knew- what exactly is the dot-pitch? Maybe I have good eyes, or am just really masochistic, but I don't think it's too fuzzy for me.
I have a 10 inch SVGA monitor ready to go in my failed Taco case (long story, many many dollars, do not trust Digital View), but the face is not vertically flat (it's not a trinitron). I would have to work a little at cosmetically filling the gaps so it looks ok. It's got .26 dot-pitch. I have that, plus the current CC, plus a CC tube with an LC575 a/b. I'm working on which one can get the best SVGA picture.