Good lord, how did I miss this? (probably because it was posted in the Lounge under an unrelated title and folks there seemed to focus on the wood-panel). Clearly viletim did not realize the enormity of his accomplishment. Unfortunately he only posted that one time.
But he seems to allude to the fact he can only manage text due to the 2-bit video capabilities of the original Mac design. Granted that's pretty bad for even a minimal VGA 18-bit color GUI or even 8-bit grayscale output, but was producing text a limitation of the software he was running, or merely a choice?
(sidebar: I just noticed Snow Leopard does not allow me to switch to grayscale, or limit my color output anymore - unless it was moved from the display settings, was this true for Leopard as well? – presumably relying on the attached monitor to dither the signal)
This all reminds me of the Micron XCeed grayscale adapter for the SE/30. Since the SE/30 logicboard would support color graphics, the adapter ran off the color output of the XCeed PDS card and replaced the connector to the back of the CRT. So clearly this can be done by powering the existing CRT off the analogue board, the tough part seems to be the conversion of the VGA signal frequency to match it (as well as dealing with the display overflow). Can the compact analogue board be modded to display 640x480 in the same way the Colour Classic can? That would at least solve the dimensional compatibility problem, but like the CC, probably put a lot of stress on the analogue board.
So, all we need is a "box" and driver to do this one little thing. As they say in the movie: "build it and they will come".
The reality is with POS CRTs rapidly being replaced by LCD-based systems, they are a much cheaper alternative than modding the Mac's 25 year old analogue board already prone to failure, especially considering the shrinking size of the CPUs that take less and less room inside the compacts every year. So there is no real reason to go this route other than to prove it can be done. Then again, isn't that the whole point of this forum? :beige: