PSOne LCD

[SilentDeath]

I test mounted mine in a pc70 lian li using the original plastic front with the top and left side cut down a bit. this gives a few mm or annoying gap between it and the screen.

As lcd screens are not suppost to get touched or scratched etc.. im thinking of using a peice of glass to protect it. I have a piece of 2mm thickglass perfect for this but it needs cutting down a bit. I know glass can be cut, but not having dont it before I will have to research it. I know its more a case of grinding away glass rather than cutting through it in chunks (as a drill or saw would) so my dead dremmel would have been usefull here

[toby]

I can get a picture on svideo now but its black and white! any ideas how i would solve this?

[SilentDeath]

Can someone please search for me - to find the pin out of the cable going from the controler pcb to the set of connectors on the other pcb. I would like to have a vga connector directly connected instead of having an extra pcb doing nothing.

I have finnished mounting it in my pc70. quick guide:
1) Break off the plastic screw mounts on the back side of the case (four of them, from near the speakers bit).
2) Use the screw mounts and the screws to hold the screen to the controler pcb securely.
3) clean peice of glass bigger than the visible screen. Attach this to case - aviod adding fingerprints to it! Secure this using gaffer tape or other tape.
4) make a very thin saussage of bluetak (about 1-2mm thick) and put it on the corners of the lcd metal frame. If it is too thick there will be a gap between teh lcd and glass you dont want.
5) line the lcd up and squash on. Use tape again to secure it as just bluetak will probably not support its weight for long. You oculd use tape without bluetak to prevent any gap but then it will be harder to line up.

I am now trying to tidy up the cabling. I want to put a small box below the screen to house vga connector and power. This will be glued to the glass or bluetak'ed. I dont want the extra pcbs as they are not needed, once I know the pin outs.

Then I will find a gfx card capable of csync. If anyone has a spare I could have then it would save a lot of effort. Money waiting

Here is a pic of it mounted. The screen is off = black so you can see lots of reflection through the glass which you wouldnt usually notice + my web cam is crap at pics that dont have lots of light all over.



The legs broke of my lm317 chip so I need to remake that circuit, this time using a silent fan to cool the heatsink and all designed to fit in one box neatly mounted with the other conenctors ont he back of the lcd. I will probably use abit nf7-s stock nb sink for the chip (not needed as mine is watercooled). I need to use a mica shim or something to stop the hs being live.

[dignome]

System specs: gentoo linux, stripped with only xfree and a few libraries. The video card is a Matrox Millenium G200 (agp).


I have a Sony 5" psone lcd screen that has already been modded (VGA). I have confirmed that it works using powerstrip arcade mode. However I would like to use it in linux.

My question is this: can the Sony 5" psone lcd do 720x526 or is that modeline listed many times before for a larger screen? I tried that exact modeline in xfree to no avail:

HorizSync 5.0-90.0
VertRefresh 5.0-75.0
ModeLine "720x576" 14.433 720 768 840 936 576 646 650 686 interlace composite

I replaced the vsync hsync with the xfree accepted "composite" line as well, after trying those listed before with +hsync, +vsync. With the above modeline the X server will actually start, although with a completely blank screen, which may or may not indicate some success? It seems like the mga xfree driver refuses to do 640x480 here:

modeline "640x480" 13.678 640 672 736 800 480 486 494 524 interlace composite

That was flat out rejected by the xfree mga driver, reported out of range. I'm about to purchase a radeon 9000 and was wondering if this is the card people have been having success with in Linux? If not can someone list the card they have and the modeline which worked for them?

[counterclockwis]

i've not tried it yet on a compatible card (damn card not arrived yet...) but look at the screen from an angle - do you see any fuzzy image or anything? When I plugged mine into my (incompatible) nVidia card on Debian Linux boot up, I got 2 copies of the status text side by side, and extremely fuzzy. that was obviously without any configuration, so i'd expect you to get something. The screen is native at 720x576 if it is PAL (ie if you don't live in America or Japan).

With the mga driver - it may not support such a low pixel clock (13.678), it's unlikely that the lower resolution would be out of range...

If you have any fuzzing I'd keep trying with changed modelines - don't just trust what powerstrip tells you, you're using whole new drivers and a whole new display system (obviously). good luck and post any successes or failures.

[dignome]

I almost have the mga framebuffer showing up correctly on the Sony lcd. It is scrolling downward at the moment and the vertical size is out of proportion but it is aligned horizontally so I am going somewhere with it. I'm making a little progress with the x server. I can see portions of the menu in enlightenment so I guess it's a simple matter of tweaking... although I would rather mess with the fb right now as it is pretty close. I believe it is an NTSC display... which probably means I'm limited to 640x480 for the 5" Sony screen?

[counterclockwis]

yeah, you would want 640x480 if it's NTSC. that'll be why those figures you took to start with were so bad (I'm assuming you took them from this thread, rather than from your powerstrip setup) Good luck with it anyways =)

[SilentDeath]

dignome where did you buy the screen? also it should say on the box if it was either pal or ntsc.
You just need to continually tweak the timings. use the powerstrip ones as a guide, the linux ones should probably be close i think...

Anyone here got c-sync compatable spare pci card?

[dignome]

It is an NTSC display. I bought it in the states...figures. Here are the settings that I tweaked in xp using powerstrip. These are fully stretched to match the screen size using a Matrox Millenium G200 (agp 8MB):

PowerStrip timing parameters:
640x480=640,48,64,80,480,12,8,24,13193,2174

Generic timing details for 640x480:
HFP=48 HSW=64 HBP=80 kHz=16 VFP=12 VSW=8 VBP=24 Hz=30

Linux modeline parameters:
"640x480" 13.193 640 688 752 832 480 492 500 524 interlace -hsync -vsync

As for the X server, disabling mtrr support for the mga framebuffer driver seemed to solve the mtrr conflict with the xfree mga driver and framebuffer.

video=matroxfb:nomtrr on the kernel params line (along with other settings)

So far I've had no luck with it. I'm still playing around with the fb.

The matroxfb is highly tweakable, as documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/matroxfb.txt. For now I've been sitting next to the screen with a keyboard on weekends playing with fbset to obtain the right settings for the framebuffer. I also purchased a radeon 7000 oem card for $25USD, as the xfree radeon driver seems a lot more tweakable.

[dignome]

I have the framebuffer working. I'm sure more can be done to make it look a heck of a lot better though (larger fonts, more tweaking with the pixclk, etc):

To obtain the correct timings for the mga framebuffer from the linux modeline parameters that powerstip gives out, I followed the documentation here:

/usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/framebuffer.txt - Section 6 (Converting XFree timing values info frame buffer device timings)

Here is what works for me (using Sony 5" lcd, matrox millenium G200 agp):

fbset -t 75797.77 80 48 24 12 64 8

Do not forget to put csync high, and vsync hsync low and most importantly, set interlaced mode true.

fbset -csync high -hsync low -vsync low -laced true

You will also need to open another terminal and then switch back as there is some corruption that occurs after making settings. It goes away after you switch. You can either use fbset, or add it permanently to your kernel boot line parameters for a particular image:

I'll edit post later and put this here.

As for a larger font, I'm trying font_sun12x22. It is pretty readable, the only disadvantage is that you can not run menuconfig. 8x16 fonts are also decent.

This does not work on the mga X server though using mga/vga driver. Or it might, but it needs **** load more tweaking. However, I'm seeing some progress using Option "FBDev" 1.

[dignome]

I have the device successfully working in X!

To do this I used the horizontal sync and vertical refresh rates reported by fbset when I got the framebuffer working properly. When you run "$ fbset" after your framebuffer is properly set up with the Display it will spit out the current values being used... take the Hz and Vz values for the above. Then, I added those values into the Monitor section in /etc/X11/XF86Config, ex:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Sony PSOne"
HorizSync 15.857
VertRefresh 60.523
EndSection

Note: you can try the modeline in this situation, and it might work for you just fine...this is what worked for me.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Matrox G200"
Driver "mga"
Option "UseFBDev" "on"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

Note: UseFBDev might not be required, although this solved a problem where mga xfree and mga framebuffer values were conflicting when using mtrr.

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Sony PSOne"
Device "Matrox G200"
Monitor "Sony PSOne"
DefaultDepth 16

Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
EndSection

I'm going to try some more settings to tweak it further. Then play some video's dvds to see how things go. Hope this helps.

[counterclockwis]

that's really good stuff, thatks a lot! should save me lots of time =)

[Tifosi]

Just startedmodding mine its out of the case running off the official sony PSU and using the 3.5mm jack the coil at the top of the screen sparked a bit then the screeb died a few minutes later with no mods as of yet!

[counterclockwis]

that doesnt sound good. the coil is the step up transformer for the CCFL. The screen may still work, but it sounds like you killed the backlight so it may be hard to tell...

[SilentDeath]

if the backlight inverter is dead get a cheap inverter from ebuyer and connect that to the ccfl tube wires. The ccfl tubes should be near enough in spec to run from different inverters.
Your lucky, as I said earlyer in the thread, the ccfl runs at 1.8kv, meaning putting your hand within 3mm could possibly arc to your hand (if its an uninsulated trace). This would be very painfull Im sure, and possibly leathal (ccfls draw about 5ma which, if it traveled from hand to hand through your heart, would be enough to kill you, iirc). I am tempted to test it, from tip of finger to hand, just to see what it feels like

There is no reson to run the screen without the back or the front really after you have got the seperate bottom part of the case off you can put the top back on - unless youve got it ounted somewhere.....

I really need a csync compatable multimonitor card (single monitor output is fine, just needs multimonitor compatable drivers, by that i mean not ati rage pro....). I have money waiting if anyones got a spare.