Testing, cleaning and tuning up a small IBM VGA monitor (that's built like a tank!)

security bits huh well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video i'm going to be talking about this ibm ps1 vga monitor here i was recently given this thing i have no idea if it works i actually don't even know if it can work on its own because originally some of you may recognize this this is an ibm ps1 monitor sort of part of a not quite an all-in-one but the monitor sat on top of a little computer it all fit together perfectly in fact this monitor has the power supply in it for the ps1 computer but on its own here i don't have the little computer maybe this thing can make a decent little vga monitor so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] so this monitor is certainly not the prettiest looking monitor in the world but i really have a soft spot in my heart for small vga type monitors and this looks like to me it's 12 maybe 13 inches at most and i kind of love that i actually don't have a single small vga monitor in the shop here in fact check out the sony one that's sitting up here on the ibm 5170 that's a multi-scan e200 which is big 17 inches maybe took the tilt stand off the bottom because the thing is just so massive really heavy it's a really great monitor but it's just so big sometimes i just want to use a smaller monitor something that's a little less imposing on top of a desktop computer that just fits a little bit better now the local person who gave me this monitor had no idea if this thing even works or not and it's in rather dirty condition although it doesn't seem like it's physically beat up it definitely needs a deep cleaning if it works look at the side profile this monitor it's pretty big it's got some junk in the trunk shall we say this big booty section here which definitely sticks out further than you would think for a monitor of this size in typical ibm fashion this thing is built like a tank and it's really heavy now tilting the monitor up exposes the controls which are on the front here there's a headphone jack there's a volume slider uh brightness and contrast and the power switch which kind of sticks out the front these are all sort of recessed under the monitor here but the fact that there is headphone connection implies that this thing does let me put this down it's so heavy that audio feeds from its original computer back into this and there must be a built-in speaker in here now the back of the monitor there are three fixed cables on here and everything is rather dirty so i'm going to try to bring these up here without getting my hands too filthy we have two d sub connectors here we have the vga hd15 and another 15 pin but this time it's a female connector and then there is a regular mains plug for north america now on the ps1 computer the regular vga cable carries the video signal so that's all pretty standard but this cable here is what feeds the power back into the computer and i guess the audio from the machine into the monitor as well so this is necessary for use with a ps1 since the monitor is giving it power but i'm under the assumption that if i just don't connect this cable and i rely on just the vga that at least i can get this thing working as a standard vga monitor now looking at the rest of the back of the monitor it's flat except for this area here which just sticks out another inch or about two and a half centimeters from this flat part so i'm not sure what's going on here although maybe that's part of the power supply or something we're going to crack this thing open and take a look inside on the ibm sticker here 120 volts part number is 53 f5798 there's a serial number manufacturing date is may 1990. on the underside there's not much to report except for this thing which looks like a trapdoor and when you flip it down even though it can flop back and forth it's got two little tongs here and i assume this tilts the monitor because when this when you push down on these little tongs it locks this whole thing into place so i guess this is like a negative tilt stand with the kickstand down it makes the monitor look strange like maybe it's in heat or something i i don't know but the front of the screen is perpendicular pretty much to the table so i suppose if this was sitting on top of your ps1 it would be a little better if the ps1 were not low down but you know up a little bit higher so you had a better straight on view to the monitor and it's stable like i said when that little kickstand is pushing down the table it locks it into place so it's kind of a cool design if i tilt it forward then i can flip the kickstand easily enough and put it down but if you tilt it forward and you put the kickstand down and you put it down it's locked so even when i slide this around on the table the kickstand won't risk falling down so i think before i even turn this thing on i want to take the back cover off just take a look inside and see if anything looks really out of the ordinary or wrong in there that could risk damaging it further if i turn it on i'm not going to do any cleaning of this outside of the monitor though before i know for sure that this thing works only because if it's totally beyond repair i don't want to spend effort doing that work it sort of cut my losses so to speak before i i go forward with any other work on this monitor so let me crack the back off and let's peer inside security bits huh yeah you heard right ibm used security bits on the outside screws for this thing so luckily i had that correct bit in my little tool set so you just take out the four screws there was a little cover on the back of the monitor i wanted to see what that was in case there was a screw but it wasn't it was just a little plastic cover covering up the molding marks there are a couple screws in the little tilt stand which you do have to remove and pull that thing off as well then the back cover just lifts right off the cables feed through the back hole all right well inside the monitor it's pretty cramped in here here's the speaker which fires outside of the case there's a fan so that looks really dusty i'd say this thing got a lot of use although a lot of the dirt in here came from falling inside of the vents because i could see it sort of piled up on top of where the vent holes were but there definitely is a lot of dust in here from from usage as well especially from this fan here this big section over here is the power supply for the monitor and the computer combination of both and uh hopefully it won't mind turning on the monitor without the computer load being connected also the fan is probably dead or super noisy it would be nice just to take it out or disable it because i'm never going to use this with a ps1 computer and the load on the power supply will be a lot less without the computer drawing on it so it probably is fine without the fan and the power for the fan actually comes from the motherboard pcb it's a little tough to get to so there we go i pulled it off so i'm just going to leave this off entirely since i'm sure this is going to be super loud i have to say one thing it's just a little bit of a pet peeve but like there's a zip tie right here they never even cut the excess length off here i mean come on just what does that take one split second to cut that there we go they cut it over here i see other areas where it's it was cut but oh no well not this one either though so they cut one of them and then they left this one right here i'm trying to give you a better view down into the monitor it's pretty tight and this board over here is the video board the vga cable comes in here's the rgb signals feed into that board this is what processes the video and that goes to the neck boards there are obviously these potentiometers right here for adjusting things unfortunately they are completely unlabeled well there are labels like vr 502 and 602 but there's no actual label on what those do but those might be the drive signals because i'm not even seeing any kind of drive adjustments on the neck board here it's probably this is probably the drive and the cut or bias right there now looking down there on the main board sorry the camera angle is not conducive to seeing it but i see at least with coil and also it looks like another adjustable transformer which might be the position or vertical size or something like that actually i just noticed right here on the side there are some more controls as for the geometry so starting at the closest to the front of the monitor pcc it's probably pin cushion something like that vertical size vertical center vertical frequency so that would be i guess for adjusting like vertical hold basically uh v line horizontal frequency so that's horizontal hold and then the last control on the end here is horizontal phase so that is the horizontal position so that definition leads to what i was thinking that these two controls on the board down there are for vertical size and horizontal size i am trying to see what the label says on the crt but unfortunately just due to the way that this metal construction is on the monitor it is impossible to see the metal is very close to the label i can just see that it's made in taiwan but that's about it when looking at the main pcb with a flashlight i found two more controls down there you can see mode 3 v size and mode 2 v size you can also just make out a samsung logo and name under some wires just to the left of those controls in addition on the side of the monitor there are cutouts in the metal for access to the flyback transformer so you can adjust focus and the screen brightness so i now have the monitor connected to the mains voltage it's not plugged into any computers though let's see what happens when we turn it on hey it degaussed powered up i hear high voltage so this is all good signs i i have a feeling this thing is going to generate a picture i just have the brightness and the contrast set in the middle here okay there we go there is definitely image i'm rather surprised that the sliders aren't even that scratchy which is quite amazing and who knows is this a typical for ibm monitors i've never owned an ibm monitor do they show white like this when there's no input signal is that normal for these or not the vga monitors that is for a vga signal i'm going to use this acer aspire one remember these these netbooks here this thing has windows xp on it what i like about it is it has vga output and it still works perfectly with windows xp so it's kind of perfect for trying to drive these old monitors let's just connect this up to the side here actually let me make sure all the pins are straight yes everything looks good there oh it says ibm right here on the vga connector let's connect this up it's normal that there's no signal yet um the computer's still detecting the monitor i heard it make the beep beep sound and i'm just going to switch this from internal display to external display all right well it's working except um clearly one of the issues is it is driving the monitor at too high of a frequency so i would assume this thing is probably only good for 640 by 480 possibly oh nice it reverted back to the laptop possibly 800 by 600 at 60 hertz something like that so unfortunately the drivers are just not going to let me drive a monitor 640 480. so this little netbook as useful as i thought it was is not useful enough i'm going to have to hook up to one of my pcs down here which could drive this thing at the native resolution this dos machine down here is my favorite mini tower machine it's a pentium mmx200 and i love this machine has a 360k floppy drive i use this thing pretty much the most of any of my old retro pcs especially because i can slow it down to around a 386 speed thanks to stuff i found on phil's computer lab anyhow normally this is plugged into a kvm and is connected to this monitor and this keyboard so what i did is i unplugged the vga cable from the back and i plugged this ibm monitor directly into this machine so when i turn it on here we should get an image maybe there it is so the brightness control is actually all the way down right now so that's why that looks not so great and there it is all the way up turn it back to a reasonable level and the contrast okay there it is all the way down and all the way up oh okay now you saw the windows 98 logo is this thing booted up but if i go into windows 98 it's not going to work because i have high resolution settings on windows 98 for my other monitor so it definitely isn't going to work so i'm going to try one of these games here and we will see how those look and there is doom most excellent i gotta say this thing looks uh pretty good actually i feel like every time i get a vga monitor lately it's very worn out the problem with vga monitors is that they were usable for quite a long time you could still use an old vga monitor with a pc that was relatively new and modern you could basically use it until you wanted an lcd or it died and then you bought an lstd and since crts are consumable items if someone kept using it until the crt was so worn out that it was really hard to use then you know they're not going to work very well today right and that's that's my biggest issue with a lot of crts that that you find these days i have gone and bought stuff off of say craigslist for you know cheap but people said oh works great i get it home it's worn out it has burn in it's it's fuzzy the image is just not good sorry i'm not really paying attention while i'm playing here so you know it's like i said it's just hard to find good vga monitors so this one is not bad not bad at all i'm going to say the only issue i notice with this is i'd say that the cutoffs are probably not adjusted quite perfectly because uh it's so dark in this part of the screen darker than i really remember it being in fact the sony monitor that's sitting on top of the ibm here it doesn't render this dark section as dark as this one does the image is pretty good it's pretty bright the colors are quite vibrant and i know that doesn't necessarily come across in the camera looking at this information screen for doom here it's the monitor is not the sharpest monitor in the world that's for sure and i don't know maybe this was never that good in the first place since it's a pretty low res monitor but it would be nicer if it was sharper although at this point the fact is this monitor seems to work quite well i haven't noticed any issues with it so it deserves a really good deep cleaning and some calibration and that might clean up and sharpen up this image quite a bit so at this point i think what i want to do is take this thing apart further and give it a nice good cleaning to clean do you hear that i'm getting some static on the volume on the out of the speaker oh it's the volume pot it's very scratchy okay anyways i think what i'm going to do is take this monitor apart further and give it a nice deep cleaning the cleaning it deserves there's a lot of schmutz around oh the video cable probably fell off the back of the computer there's a lot of schmutz around the edge of the screen here just stuff is falling in there so i think it'd be best if i just take the crt out and then i can really give this thing a nice deep cleaning so disassembly time in trying to take the monitor apart turns out that the front bezel needs to come off first so there are four screws around that bezel the crt is mounted to the chassis behind it next i take off the power switch and the controls the front controls and the headphone jack with everything free the front bezel simply lifts away although watch out because the power led is actually screwed into the front and needs to be removed now it's time to give the monitor a good clean it's just so dirty it doesn't come across in the camera but it felt so good to clean it i took it outside and i used compressed air to blow the massive amount of dust out of it sorry for the out of focus camera footage i had the focus locked on the camera dope i don't show this on camera but i took the back cover and the front bezel i gave it a good wash in my utility sink and i let it dry overnight so now it looks all clean before reassembly it's time to put deoxide into the front controls because we all know the volume is a bit scratchy of course you move it back and forth quite a bit i also did the same to the power switch i gave the monitor a little bit of a wipe down on the inside just a little bit of windex on a paper towel i just like things looking clean watch out if you do this make sure the crt is fully discharged and unplugged first some of the wires were a little bit messy looking these are the sync wires from the vga cable so i just wanted to give them a few zip ties and keep them away from the flyback transformer i'm putting the speaker back on here even though it's not going to be used i just wanted to have it there and the back stabilizer bar crt is looking so nice and clean it just makes me happy before the bezel goes on i gotta reinstall the led the front bezel goes on before the controls are reattached to the chassis so i just have to move those out of the way and then put the four screws into the corners and then you can reattach all of the front controls and the headphone jack two of the controls that are available on the top side of the pcb like the width coil are actually visible and accessible from the bottom side of the monitor so i'm marking them with a sharpie to more easily find them and we're done put the monitor down and it reminds me of how ridiculously heavy this is well the monitor is back together it's all cleaned up inside and i did a few things i just want to talk about really quick so there are only two cords coming out of the back right now because i removed the power cord that goes to the ps1 computer now i didn't cut anything or damage anything so if i ever get a ps1 computer and i say want to use this monitor with it i can just re-install this cord and for now there will just be a blank hole in the back of the monitor but it's uh it's no big deal it's not dangerous there's nothing in there that you could touch accidentally and i'd just rather not have this thick cord banging around off the back of the monitor and the other thing i took out was the fan so this was the original fan that was in there kind of noisy and not so great so i took it off the bracket which is reinstalled and i cut the cable as you notice there's no cable on here just a little a little bit of length left and i reinstalled the connector and it is right here there's heat shrink tubing on the end i just left that in there so if i ever do reinstall a fan in here i can buy a much quieter one like a noctua reinstall it in this bracket here and attach it to the connector and we are all good the speaker is hooked up and it's reinstalled even though it doesn't go anywhere so i think at this point i need to plug this in let it warm up and hook it up to a computer and then put some test patterns through it so i can start adjusting things so the monitor is all warmed up at this point and i want to start fiddling with the controls to adjust the geometry it actually was really quite good right out of the box but i'd like to make the picture wider and taller than it is now so the first thing i'm going to do is use this little plastic adjustment tool and i wish i knew what these were called when it came to ordering the safe digikey maybe an alignment tool i've had this for years i don't even know where i got this but this is the type of tool you need to adjust those with coils there's a bit of an allen key thing going on and it's plastic it has to be plastic if you try to put a metal allen key in those with coils when the monitor is powered up is not a good thing bad things will happen so i'm just going to widen this picture up i'm running check it here i have the brightness turned up on purpose so i can see the raster so i'm just trying to reduce the the black bars on the side here i was having a hard time getting my hand inside the monitor and i actually i touched my knuckle on something that was high voltage that was exposed so it gave me a little bit of a of a zap i think it was the deflection horizontal deflection uh it seems like there's just not a whole lot of range for this adjustment i can make it smaller so there the picture is shrinking i'm not sure how visible that is because there's a lot of turns on this thing but i can't really make it that's it that is that right there is about as wide as it can get so that's uh that's annoying i guess it's just that's the way this monitor is it's not really um it's just not really designed to make the the overall active picture area that large so regular vga monitors like this there's not super vga just regular vga there's three different scan modes this operates in the most common is 640 by 400 it runs at 70 hertz it's what text mode runs at that that's a 720 by 400 but essentially it's 400 lines and it is 70 hertz and i think um that's what we're in right now oh no this is not what we're in right now this is one of the other modes which is ega which is 640 by 350 lines i think at 60 hertz and then there's one more mode which is 640 by 480. and on this monitor there are three controls for the vertical size for each of the modes there's mode 1 mode 2 and mode 3. now the mode 1 control is actually on the side here with these adjustments but the other two height adjustments are the little potentiometers that are inside the monitor on the pcb very hard to get to and you can also not get to them from the bottom there's no hole in the pcb to allow you to put an alignment tool in from the bottom crappy design on ibm's part or whoever designed this monitor so i think the mode 1 which is the control on the side here is the ega mode and yep you see it's actually adjusting uh this mode now i shrunk it down and if i hit enter here there we go notice that the the height is different on this mode and if i turn this adjustment here nothing happens at all and same goes for like this mode here which is the 640x720 again the adjustment here does nothing so in ega mode i'm going to use a ruler and measure the distance here from the edge of the screen to the the lines here the vertical line and it's about one and a half centimeters and on this side okay so the monitor needs to be moved that way first i'm going to adjust that and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the measurement that's on the sides here and i'm going to try to adjust the v size so it has exactly the same measurement the horizontal phase h phase is the control on the side here and this is shared between all three modes so i need to adjust it here for evenness then go check the other two modes to make sure it's similarly even if it may move around slightly and i just need to kind of split the difference so right now the problem running into is the vertical phase or the position of the screen isn't quite right the picture is actually shifted up towards the top of the screen a little bit there's a control for vcenter right here on the side of the monitor i can at least center the the overall picture and try to get this even okay we're still in ega mode i've switched to one with a blue background so i can more accurately measure where the pixels start because this bottom one it has a line as opposed to letter so the blue background is what i'm going to be measuring against and there we go i'm very happy with that now if i switch over to the next mode it's just this one 640x480 i'd like to stretch it a little more it seems like the border is a bit too big on the top and the bottom now now believe it or not the border is actually relatively even all the way around but i just like to stretch it a little bit on the vertical size but yeah of course this is one of the controls that's deep in the monitor there so i'm gonna have to try to get a tool on there and um figure out how to adjust it and this is what i came up with here so it's a non-conductive ceramic phillips head on the end attached to this uh thing with some blue painters tape and it's um pretty it's pretty stiff so that that should do the trick i can get down in there and adjust that tool okay i think i'm on the pot here there it is look at that yes all right i think i'm pretty much happy with that i mean there's no way to get this perfect because each of the different modes has slightly different position and i can't make the picture wider i'd like to make it wider and i can't so i just kind of have to eyeball it and think okay that looks fine and finally we have the 640 by 400 the 70 hertz mode which again i think feels too shrunk and it's the other adjustment that's down and under there in the monitor let me get it on here this is right next to the high voltage anode cap like i'm talking uh it's touching it right now so luckily this whole thing is non-conductive oh too much okay i think i'm happy with that let's uh exit out of this mode here back to text mode there we go there's text mode and yeah okay i think i've reduced the border a little bit because it just seemed egregiously big originally on this monitor now using this 640x480 grid i'm going to adjust the focus control on the flyback transformer it's the top control just to see if i can sharpen this up a little bit so that's a lot fuzzier i don't know if that comes across in the camera but it's blurry there and and it goes past it's now blurry again so yep this monitor was pretty much adjusted as good as it could get and it's just not that sharp of a crt when adjusting focus you should look over here in the corners and you should look in the center and just balance it out a monitor like this probably has dynamic focus which means the focus voltage changes slightly as it scans through because there's a longer path for the beam to travel to hit over here than in the center right so it's going to need to vary so usually monitors like this do have the dynamic focus i think top to bottom potentially too so they maintain relatively even focus all the way across but generally just sort of look to the corner and center and adjust it as best as possible for both so i've gone ahead and turned off the overhead lights and i've turned the contrast all the way down i turned the brightness up so i see the raster here and i'm just going to adjust some of these controls here to see what they do so you notice this one is adjusting the kind of the background light gray color you want to just make it so you just see that the gray in the raster and the contrast is all the way down so that's we're still seeing a bit of an image there but yeah this this controls that that's the green uh this is these are the controls on the front here so this is probably going to be red green and blue yep that's that one is the red and this one will be blue yep okay that's the blue and then these other three controls are gonna be the drive controls probably okay they are having an effect but they're having an effect on the white part of the screen so if i turn up the contrast here and turn the brightness down you'll see that it will be changing the way this looks here so i'm going to kind of give this thing an alignment this is you got to go back and forth i don't know i'm calling it alignment i found that the white part of the text was a bit too yellowy color for my taste a little bit less blue than i'd like although the the gray on the background looked okay so so you kind of have to go back and forth between having the brightness turned up all the way like like this just at the very edge where you can just start to see which is why you have the lights off and you adjust the three controls closer to the front which is the bias controls and then the three controls for the drive will be adjusting the text the white text here the color of that and they do affect each other so you have to go back and forth and keep adjusting it now i have to say i'm very pleased with the way this monitor turned out the colors are vibrant they are bright and they're vibrant not all vga crts can claim that characteristic probably because they use phosphor that's just not as high quality or maybe the shadow mask is much denser so there's less light getting to your eyes not sure but this thing like looking at this text here it looks bright it's relatively sharp i mean it's not a high resolution crt but it's pretty sharp i mean it's very readable and the pixels are very easy to make out and the colors they just look great and from a uniformity perspective everything looks good too i don't have any weird like color blotches or anything this monitor has a working degauss i can hear it when i first turn it on and it seems to be effective because everything is looking good green looks great blue is vibrant blue color looks fantastic and i think i'm ready to put the case back together there's not too much to putting the case back together but just slide the back cover on it kind of falls into place and then you have to reinstall the little kickstand which has two screws then you have to install the five screws with the security bit so make sure you have that handy and now it's back together one final touch up and clean with magic eraser and some windex just to make the thing look perfect i honestly couldn't be happier how this monitor turned out it looks fantastic now i mean other than the strange way the monitor looks from the factory at least now it's incredibly clean and it really blows my mind i don't see any scratches on this thing at all it really has no blemishes that i can tell it's a shame i don't know the original ps1 that goes with this but it's not the end of the world because that computer is not super useful i think the fastest configuration was a 46 dx 266 but a lot of them are 286s and 386s and stuff like that so oh well i have i have other pcs that are perfectly good that will work great with this monitor now i had mentioned this briefly earlier about the size of this screen i thought it was maybe 12 inches or potentially 13. well with a ruler up to the glass it's actually a bit over 11 and underneath the bezel it is a 12-inch vga crt that's in here so pretty small which is pretty cool the lack of a swivel stand on here is a little bit of an annoyance but you might have seen me use this thing before on the channel and this is a tandy although it was sold under various names tilt swivel stand that is perfect for putting under monitors that don't have one built in now with the odd shape of this monitor it might be a bit hard to use this thing but i'm going to try i think most of the weight is up at the front anyways where the glass is so let's see how this works on this tilt swivel stand well i'm going to say that that tilt swivel stand works flawlessly with this monitor it's not perfect the monitor is a little smaller than the width of the stand as you see there but hey that's no big deal when you're looking at it from the front you won't even notice that and this gives you the ability to move the screen around without too much difficulty if you're looking for one of these tilt swivel stands yourself i can't even really tell you what to search for on ebay i think i found one just called tilt swivel stand i paid like 15 shipped and um it's pretty amazing i have to say i love this these were really common back in the old days for this exact purpose and radio shack obviously sold them they did not make them but they sold them so you might find them under different brands but yeah look for this particular one it's a pretty good stand and it works great with a lot of monitors for me the final step after working on any crt is to just use it because sometimes there may be faults inside like an arcane flyback transformer or other issues that you may not notice after just running it a few minutes so it's good to put it through its paces so here i am i have hooked up to my pentium 200 machine there and i'm just running some various games on it and spending a good amount of time with it warming up the crt and just enjoying it i know i've already mentioned this but the colors on this screen just pop they're bright vibrant and very pleasing to look at and honestly the small size of it makes 320 by 200 games or 320 by 240 games like these actually seem a little less chunky than they are normally because when you play them on a big monitor like that sony i have the pixels are just so large and square so it's kind of nice to see them at a much smaller reduced size so if you happen to come across one of these ibm ps1 monitors and you don't have the computer rest assured that you can use this on any of your pcs up to 640x480 and it makes a great little monitor and with that i'm going to end this video here from a monitor that i had no idea if it even worked filthy dirty thing to something that looks really nice and works really well i couldn't be happier and i know i seem to do a lot of crt monitor videos lately but i just love the way crts look i mean don't get me wrong on modern computers i don't want to use anything but a nice high resolution high refresh rate lcd but when it comes to retro computers for some reason i just really enjoyed the way it looks coming out of that glass screen with that glow of the phosphor and the flicker of the refresh rate something about is just sort of magical to me brings me back to the old days so if you like this video you know what to do if you didn't you know what to do as well and you know all the usual youtube stuff and that's going to be it so stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] goodbye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 33,912

Rating: 4.977716 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7Jt_nBugP3Y

Length: 34min 32sec (2072 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021