Re: Modern myths

From: Marko Mäkelä (msmakela_at_cc.hut.fi)
Date: 1999-04-22 08:35:01

On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, William Levak wrote:

> As you change the values from their optimum level, the image begins to
> waver and distort.  Getting farther away, you lose sync and the picture
> breaks up.  Even further, and the driver circuitry (technically known as a
> ramp generator) ceases to respond to the signals and the screen goes
> blank.  NONE of this damages the display in any way.

What about the urban legends that one could damage a PC display by feeding
wrong line frequencies to it?  I've heard of one friend's friend whose
monitor let the smoke out only after a few seconds of wrong signals.  Has
anyone really seen a flyback transformer or some other component that has
fried because of out-of-specs frequencies?  (Hmm, now when I think of it,
many PAL TVs keep a little noise when fed with an NTSC signal.)

My Data General fixed-frequency monitor (75 kHz/70 Hz) confirms what Bill
is saying: It tolerates (terribly wrong) VGA frequencies pretty well.  It
just won't sync before SVGATextMode or XFree86 sets the proper
frequencies.

> When it comes to choosing between the information of a qualified engineer,
> and gossip and rumor....   Well, there isn't really any choice.

A Commodore engineer could have chosen to lie in order to protect his
company.  And those modern myths are fascinating, aren't they? :-)

But what about floppy music, shouldn't it be able to break hardware?  Are
there any floppy music programs for the PET?  For the C64, there is Drive
Composer at <URL:http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/c64/diskutil/misc/>.

	Marko

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