Back in the olden days, home computers used to connect to the tv pretty much the same way as modern consoles do now. Scart was still available, but wasn’t on every TV as it was a higher end feature of a tv. You also had a choice of RF output (aerial lead) and composite output. Out of the 3, scart gave the best picture as it used a lead coming from the amiga monitor port, composite gave second best and RF with the worse but it did work on every tv known to man at the time.

So, times have changed now and I have lots of vga monitors so I wanted to convert the output to vga. It’s not quite as simple as you think it might be in today’s age. You need 2 things to be able to do this, a scandoubler which will change the frequency of the output to 50-60hz which is vga friendly, unlike the 15hz normally output by the amiga. The other component that isn’t required before things will work as such, but will make things a lot nicer is a flickerfixer, will will handle and stabilize the interlaced resolutions, which tend to give you more screen real estate, a la resolution.

I opted for an internal solution for one of my amigas which as a circuit board with a chip socket on it and a vga trailer cable with socket so a monitor can be plugged into it. It is installed by turning the board upside down and lining up the chip socket with the lisa chip legs exposed on the top of the amiga motherboard and then pressing with all your might, which is a little scary, but sure enough it snaps into place and after testing, it worked nicely. I don’t envy the task of ever having to remove this from the lisa chip though.

I also invested in a second solution which was a custom made (not by me) external scandoubler \ flickerfixer which takes output from the amiga monitor port and also does a pretty spot on job of making the signal vga friendly. The latter solution makes thing nice and easy for swapping amigas back and forth as I do different things to each.

So, primarily I now have the basics of what I need to actually start this project as it’s kind of essential being able to see some kind of output screen when working with a computer and, since I didn’t have a tv spare this has worked out nicely.