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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,comp.misc
Subject: Re: What the world needs now
Message-ID: <18989@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Thu, 21-May-87 13:53:35 EDT
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Posted: Thu May 21 13:53:35 1987
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Xref: mnetor talk.bizarre:1847 comp.misc:557


A few years back, PC magazine and PC World published claims that it was 
possible to program the video controller chip in the CGA
(Computer Graphice Adapter) video adapter board
so that an ordinary color monitor's flyback transformer would overheat
and catch fire. Has anybody done this? Is it included in anyone's copy
detection? Anyone's error handler?

It should be real simple to do. That chip gives you pretty good control
over the video waveform, so you ought to be able to play with the timing
of the horizontal sync pulse, (which, as I remember, was the way the trick
was done.) has anybody extened these techniques to the more sophisticated
EGA (Extended Graphics), and PGA (Professional Graphics).

Of course, if you wrap a Macintosh completely in saran wrap, it will overheat
enough to make a wisp of smoke come out of a melting power supply diode.

I think I'll just settle for the spectacular but non-destructive light show
that you sometimes get when you crash a computer with a memory-mapped color
display.

--- David Phillip Oster         -- "The goal of Computer Science is to
Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu  -- build something that will last at
Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster     -- least until we've finished building it."