Do early Apple Macs have inputs?

[bluejay]

Do early all-in-one macs with the crts in them have coax or a/v inputs? I was wondering if I could connect a console or a computer onto it.

[Osgeld]

no, the apple TV model was the first AFAIK (and those are hard to get at a reasonable price) a number of the beige towers had it as an option (I  had my PS/2 ran though my 8500 to a very large VGA screen, was nice) 

 

edit: meant the macintosh tv not apple tv

Edited September 8, 2019 by Osgeld

[Flojomojo]

Agree that the old-world (beige) Macs aren't going to be good for this, particularly the monochrome Mac Plus and Mac SE you would associate with all-in-ones. You could use it as a terminal to another computer like a BBS, of course. 

 

I would think it would be possible to splice in some kind of video input to the internal VGA on a G3 iMac, but it would be a pain and hardly worth it. 

[The Usotsuki]

There are capcards for some of the 68040 Macs that came with certain models.  But those are desktops, not AIOs, and wayyyy ahead of the classic toasters.

[+save2600]

How early a Mac are we talking? If it has FireWire, can get yourself an external video capture device. That would be one way of using the monitor for your game systems.

[carlsson]

The built-in monitor on an old Mac SE or similar also is monochrome, 512x342 pixels with a horizontal (?) sync at 22.25 kHz and vertical (?) sync at 60.15 Hz. I don't know what it would take to feed a signal of different properties, but it probably wouldn't be trivial. Your typical video game will output ~15 kHz horizontal and either ~50 or ~60 Hz vertical depending on PAL or NTSC. A PC with VGA outputs ~31 kHz horizontal. The oddball 640x350 mode on EGA graphics cards has ~23 kHz horizontal which is the closest to the Mac monitor.

[bluejay]

The first ones from the early-mid 80s

On 9/9/2019 at 6:05 AM, save2600 said:

How early a Mac are we talking? If it has FireWire, can get yourself an external video capture device. That would be one way of using the monitor for your game systems.

 

[Flojomojo]

Yeah, forget about using those oddball monitors for anything modern, for reasons detailed by @carlsson above. Unless you want to gut it and put something modern in there, which kinda defeats the purpose. 

[carlsson]

Of course if you can reprogram your external system to output a signal that matches what the monitor expects, it might be a way forward. For instance Steve Gray has a Commodore PET Editor project with possibility to create custom ROMs, in particular for the CRTC enabled 4000/8000 series that might be possible to match with a Mac monitor, in case you've got a PET/CBM with broken built-in monitor so you need to connect it to the built-in monitor of a Mac instead...

[jhd]

8 hours ago, carlsson said:

in case you've got a PET/CBM with broken built-in monitor so you need to connect it to the built-in monitor of a Mac instead...

 

Now, that would be a truly impressive example of hardware hacking! (useless in practice, but still impressive) 

[Ed in SoDak]

There was an LC/PDS TV tuner card for some of the Performas, with RF and composite inputs that displayed the video in a window or full-screen, but it would be woefully inadequate as a monitor. Resolution looked more like a VCR created the picture. But I could watch a tape or the Dish satellite signal on the Mac while I did something else.

 

Some of the LC/Quadra/Performa Macs were All-In_one, including the Mac TV mentioned above by Carlsson. http://lowendmac.com/mac-500-and-5000-series/

-Ed

Edited September 12, 2019 by Ed in SoDak

[Osgeld]

not to mention the LC / performa line was the absolute cat's yack in terms of performance, I have had a machine or a two (heh damn apple's) of those era's and they just cant handle more than a postage stamp real media size stream, which expanded to even the era monitors would net you a resolution of ass x balls at a FPS of are you fkin kidding me at full screen .... 

 

which was perfectly fine in the early 90's we were impressed you could see a color photograph back then, the fact you could encode a few seconds of just above garbage video on a desktop machine was the shiz-nit

[wierd_w]

Which is kinda silly, since the Amigas of the same era could do real-time NTSC compositing. (Course, it was all tricks with the NTSC signal generator chips, but still.) They both used 68k series CPUs.

 

About the only kind of "input" the all in one early macs had was the "Processor Direct Slot", but I do not think any capture cards for things of the color classic era exist. The soonest  see capture cards is in the PowerPC era.

[The Usotsuki]

4 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Which is kinda silly, since the Amigas of the same era could do real-time NTSC compositing. (Course, it was all tricks with the NTSC signal generator chips, but still.) They both used 68k series CPUs.

 

About the only kind of "input" the all in one early macs had was the "Processor Direct Slot", but I do not think any capture cards for things of the color classic era exist. The soonest  see capture cards is in the PowerPC era.

There were some Quadras with that capability (68040 era) but pretty sure nothing for LCs (which the Color Classic essentially is, being that it supports the //e card).

[Osgeld]

17 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Which is kinda silly, since the Amigas of the same era could do real-time NTSC compositing. (Course, it was all tricks with the NTSC signal generator chips, but still.) They both used 68k series CPUs.

 

yea but they were not inputting video (unless your throwing a video toaster or some other expensive and semi exotic solution in the mix) you can make an atari 2600 composite over standard video with a fairly simple circuit and many computers did that back in the day including the apple II which has the video hardware of some ram and a shift register 

 

edit: here's an example of an 8 bit AVR microcontroller overlaying text on a 2600 using like 2 chips and a few passives back when I was interested in making a 2600 pause mod delux which was to include "paused" text and a DVD player style screensaver after X time ... its not exactly magic to composite signals, its timing more than anything 

 

Edited September 15, 2019 by Osgeld