Apricot Fi Mono Monitor

[NeXT]

I know there's a scant few who remember Apricot, much less know the hardware well enough to answer this but does anyone know if the monochrome monitor that shipped with the F1/F1e was compatible with the external monitor port found on the FP/Portable? There's next to no information on the external monitor so I don;t know if it will work or if bad things happen when the wrong monitor is plugged in.

 

[Cager]

As far as I am aware, the external monitor socket was only supplied on the FP/Portables that had the internal colour option (incl additional RAM) & was for connecting an Apricot colour monitor. Although I haven't found anything which directly says what would happen if you connected a mono monitor, I quote from a News Section of a 1986 Apricot User magazine: 'Although the portable doesn't normally drive a monochrome monitor, Fraser Associates has introduced a mono Monitor Adapter for £30. It is designed to plug into the back of the Portable for those people .......who don't want to go to the expense of a colour monitor ....' This suggests it wouldn't be a good idea to connect a mono monitor.

 

[NeXT]

I took your advice and decided to see what happened anyways.

The result is nothing. The monitor doesn't seem to power up. The computer isn't affected and really, nothing seems to happen. So I guess at the least we know that plugging the mono monitor in doesn't blow anything up.

 

[stephen_usher]

The F Series Monitor is not pin compatible with the Portable.

The F Series DB9 socket is wired very differently and has a 17V DC power pin which powers the monitor. The power for this doesn't come from the main PSU, instead it uses an external 17V AC supply plugged into the back of the computer, which is then rectified on the motherboard. I've found that an 18V DC supply works well with this. (Anything below ~16.5V doesn't power the monitor enough as the primitive 12V regulation circuit in the monitor has a large voltage drop.)

The FP's monitor output is almost useless as it's not a duplicate of the LCD screen. You can switch to the external monitor using a keyboard short cut but unless you have the specific GSX-86 driver installed applications won't use it and it'll switch back to the LCD.

 

[NeXT]

Yeah the brochure mentions the color display option for the Portable was more or less a second monitor for the computer, but without mirroring.
Thank you for looking into this though. I had suspected for a number of years now that it wasn't entirely compatible.