Rather than indulging in thread necrophilia, and resurrecting any of the many previous conversations along these lines, I decided to start a new discussion here.

I just stumbled upon this excellent article on vintagemacworld, discussing the "UglyMac", one of many variant projects that re-house a compact Mac logic board into a smaller case, with an external monitor.

The inspiration for this hack may have come from the February 1988 issue of "Apple User" magazine. The article includes a schematic for a composite video adapter for the compact Mac and a description of how to modify a monochrome Apple IIgs display to work with such an adapter.

Click to expand...

Article scan here and here provides a very clear description and schematic for an external video buffer and mods to the IIgs display.

The usual caveats ("No, this is not VGA", "No, you can't just plug any old monitor into it") apply.

I've also just read TomLee's superb Classic Mac repair notes (PDF) for the first time, and wonder why I haven't done so before. Well done, Tom.

Previously, on 68kMLA:

Mac Plus mystery port

Power R video adapter

Converting the video signal from a Mac Classic logic board?

Macintosh External Video Kit