gnu@toad.com (02/08/90)
These two monitors are completely incompatible. They use different signal levels in the monitor cable. In particular, the FM2 (17" monochrome) monitor uses the Sun 13W3 connector with 13 TTL pins and three coax lines; it actually supports greyscale, which you will discover if you plug it into a color or GX board. The M1 (19'' monochrome) is the traditional Sun 19" monitor, which uses the old 9-pin connector. Mr. Dib called this the "Philips" monitor, though I believe Sun bought them from several vendors over the years. This one does not support greyscale. To switch a 4/60 between these monitors, you need to switch frame buffers too. There is no 'adapter cable' or 'converter'. The frame buffers are all S-bus boards though, so you can just pop them in and out. You can run more than one frame buffer at once, even. By the way, the frame buffer that supports the M1 also supports the HM1 19" high resolution ECL monitor (1600x1280). You can just plug it in, it has the 9-pin cable too, and a sense wire in the cable tells the system it is highres instead of lowres. Unfortunately Sun won't let you order it that way, but if you have any lying around (or order them at the outrageous spares prices) you can plug them in. I am typing on the 17" monitor now and find it quite acceptable. It's also a lot smaller. When using a 19" monitor I prefer highres, but I use Open Windows, which scales fonts to any size; SunView users have to squint to use high res monitors. John Gilmore