Amiga VGA leads

[Harrison]

Out of the box ony the AGA (A1200 and A4000) Amigas support some screenmodes that will output to VGA monitors. However, these are only a few specific Workbench 3+ modes that can only be used in Workbench, and then only by supporting software, and not for games.

The only Amiga that did support VGA in all screenmodes was the A3000 as it had a built in flicker fixer and scan doubler. One of the reasons many viewed the A4000 as a step backwards.

To get full VGA support for most Amigas you would either need a big box Amiga and an expensive (and now very rare Amiga zorro graphics card), or alternatively a scan doubler/flicker fixer which can take any screenmode output by the Amiga and de-interlace and double its refresh rate so VGA monitors can display them.

For scan doublers/flicker fixers, there are internal and external options. An external one would just connect between the video output and the monitor and perform the upscaling and flicker fixing, but these are impossible to find these days. The other alternative is an internal flicker fixer which fits over a couple of the Amiga's internal custom chips and adds a VGA port to the back of the Amiga. Some have been made in the past and can still be found second hand for the A1200 or big box Amigas.

However, Indivision recently made and released 3 new ones. An AGA one for the A1200, one for the A4000 and CD32, and finally one for older ECS (A600, A500, A2000) machines. The AGA one is currently not available as all stock has been sold, but you may find one if you hunt around. The ECS ones are available still. Expect to pay around £120 for any of these.

A final alternative is a SVGA scan doubler/flicker fixer. These are universal and can be found on ebay for around £30-40. They upscale any PAL/NTSC signal to VGA so are not Amiga specific, and do not directly support the Amiga RGB port, so instead need to use composite or SVideo, so the up-scaled image will never be as good as a proper Amiga SD/FF.