I purchased my 2168 without a screen. I had a bad memory of using CRTs. Between the degaussing, the speakers which had to be shielded to avoid distorting the screen image, the yellowing as they age, and the Kobayashi Maru choice of a minuscule/heavy 15" vs a 50 pounds (23 Kg) back-breaking 19", I was not eager to own one again.
I opted to go with an LCD.
The criteria going into picking a screen were as follows.
At first it seemed that I was looking for an unicorn. I did not suspect what a headache it was going to be. Every monitor I looked at had shortcomings, including panels allegedly only working at 60Hz and thus skipping frames to display the 70Hz of VGA.
Built by Steve Jones this monitor is pretty much everything I wanted[1].
The only inconvenience was the six months waitlist. I ended up receiving my 19", white CheckMaster 1500+ one month earlier than expected and the wait was well worth it.
I did not try to forecast what I was going to need. I bought it with all optional panels including the Raspberry Pi slot. It feels like it features all connectors ever invented and possibly more.
Note: This monitor is so awesome it also features speakers. And not only there are HDMI inputs, there are also HDMI output!
One upsetting issue I ran into was when I attempted to connect the monitor to the computer with a VGA cable. IBM always did things its own way and the VGA connector of the IBM PS/1 was no exception.
The back of the computer does have a DE-15 but it features only 14 holes! The entry for the pin 9 (KEY/PWR) is missing[2].
The 9th and 15th pins were later used to provide DDC support. The pin 9 provides +5V to power the EDID EEPROM chip on some monitors. This in turn allows resolution detection via pin 15.
The problem is that all modern VGA cables come with the full 15 pins of modern VGA. There was no way to insert the VGA cable into the IBM connector.
There were two solutions to this problem. The first one consisted in heating a paper clip and melting a hole in the computer's VGA connector (a.k.a "Fix your IBM PS/2's VGA port with a paperclip and fire[3]"). Just reading about it gave me a cold sweat.
I preferred to risk damaging my $20 VGA cable instead. Using a plier I turned the legendary fragility of the VGA pins into a win by breaking the pin #9. It took ony two twist!
Since the Checkmate 1500 took a while to arrive, I got a Dell Ultrasharp 2007FP in the meantime. It supports 1600x1200 which pixel-perfect scales 320x200. I did not notice any frame skipping when playing at 70Hz. Overall a good second choice that I will reuse when I build a 1997 Quake PC.
| ^ | [1] | This Monitor Changes Everything: Checkmate 1500 |
| ^ | [2] | 14 Pin & 15 Pin D Connectors on VGA Cables |
| ^ | [3] | Fix your IBM PS/2's VGA port with a paper clip and fire |
