Electrical – How to make a mod for VGA cable to display only grayscale or Black & White

vga

My computer connects to the monitor using a VGA cable. I want to turn the display grayscale or black & white.

I don't want to use any software solutions as I fear it will not be as effective as I want it to be.

So I researched the Internet for RFC of VGA pin and cable and I couldn't find such an RFC and pin layout configuration was not helpful.

Is there a way I can build a mod which I can attach to either the output of the computer or to the input of the monitor, which discards the color information and display either a grayscale image or black & white image? If possible I would also like the mod to throttle the refresh rate to either 24Hz or 30Hz.

It has to display a resolution of 1920 x 1080.

Best Answer

You do not need an FPGA. The pinout of the VGA cable can be found in lots of places.

As you can see there are three separate signals. You could combine them to a single "white" signal and then re-connect that to the R/G/B pins, following this example: VGA to composite circuit. Does it work?

Changing the refresh rate is more complicated since that's entirely under the control of the sender. It's based on EDID. What you could do is disconnect the I2C lines from the target monitor and route them to an EEPROM or microcontroller of your own, which would then send back only the data for those video modes that are in 30Hz.

24Hz seems rather too low unless it's interlaced?

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