PSOne LCD

[vwonnacott]

Hi everyone - looking for some help as Im coming to the end of my patience now with this screen mod. Basically Have a Geforce TI4800 graphics card, with VGA, DVI and S-Video out. Have soldered VGA lead onto the board as the well pulicised PDF file, and had the screen working fine as a second monitor after a lot of playing around with the refresh rates. Couldnt however get this to work from boot, had to plug in another monitor to start up then swap over - I beleive this is whats termed as a C-sync issue. I therefore got advise and bought a Mystique card to add as a second card, as Im told this supports C-Sync although screen was as dead as a dodo although the card is working fine as the PC monitor run from this fine.

Therefore decided to link the screen through the easier s-video connector to try the quality, although cannot find the connector on the screen that this has to attach to. I have basically converted from an S-Video to 3.5 mm jack and haver tried both the green and black connectos that as on the board where I soldered the vga cable too but neither seem to do anything.

Any advice would be really appreaicted here.

Thanks Vincent

[Steve]

Couldnt however get this to work from boot, had to plug in another monitor to start up then swap over

This suggests to me that you need three 80ohm resistors from the RGB pins (can't remember what numbers they are on the VGA socket) on the card to ground, making it think that a monitor is attached.

[vwonnacott]

Kex thanks for the quick reply, but was hoping to try the svideo route and would appreciate some guidance on this, as some people here suggest that the picture is more than acceptable,

[Steve]

Ah, I'm afraid I personally can't help you there as I've only ever used the VGA method. Sorry.

[vwonnacott]

OK Kez - thanks anyway - just hesitant to pursue the vga mode any further as I was told the Mystique definatelly supported c-sync, and that didnt work!

[vwonnacott]

KEZ - Im gonna try the resistors after all (just shooting down the road to get them - goold old Maplins!) - can you help me a little further as to where to place these and on which pins. Many thanks for your time

[Steve]

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/pc/vga_bd15.html

Pins 1, 2 & 3 to pins 6, 7 & 8 respectively.

I have to dash out now but I'll be around later...

[TK0]

I got the mod all wired up but ive run out of time to fiddle with it, resistors in place and all, i used floppy drive ribbon to do the soldering. I dont have the time to play with powerstrip and ive just realised i have no nice way to mount the screen. In a bid to raise some cash ive just listed it on ebay, if anyone is interested http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...tem=8126301034

dont worry i havent killed it

*url update thanks to ebay vero protect idiots*

[vwonnacott]

Sorry a little confused - where do the resistors actually go - and I am following the connecting of pins 1,2,3,6,9,13 although Im unsure on 7&8

[myth]

[vwonnacott]

Myth - ive already got that one thanks, its the placing of the resisitors thats thowing me. Vincent

[SilentDeath]

The problem with swapping screens over is DEFINATLY a problem with resistors. It has never been related to csync. It appears that some gf4 cards do support csync, might be brand dependant?

Anyway I also now have this problem - with my 9500np. I used to have a 9700np before I killed it which worked fine without the resistors - set it up in the deiplays tab, and powerstrip, and it would work fine on every boot - unless you went back to the displays tab. However the 9500, be it becuase of the updated drivers I now have, or the bios version on the card, wont let me use it like that. Every restart it will disable the second monitor in windows untill it gets swappped over. Maybe someone knows an easy fix? currently I cba to fiddle with the wireing - I spent ages recently "finnishing" this mod, thinking I wouldnt need the resitors, few days later I kill my good gfx card

[gardnerp]

Did anyone ever get a PAL screen working on linux? I played around with fbset a lot but never got a stable screen.

[LCDZ]

http://oms.wmhost.com/vgargb.jpg

This is the result after connecting the Sony PSOne PAL-LCD to my Matrox G400. I've tried both CSync and also combining syncs with 7486 and the result is the same.

The image is rapidly wobbling sideways, a lot more when the display has just been turned on and looks like the one in the picture after it has been on for like 10 minutes.

Plain composite video works stable, RGB from VGA does not. Getting the adjustments done with Powerstrip was quite easy after Googling for PAL-video frequency values. The only problem now is the shaking sideways.

I'm drawing the power with 8V regulator from the PC PSU 12V line and as the composite video works OK I'm thinking the power is not the issue. I also have another Sony PSOne LCD and it has the exact same problem.

Any help would be appreciated.


Btw, these official Sony PSOne LCDs use the exact same LCD-element by Samsung in both PAL and NTSC displays, and the resolution of the element is only 320x240.

[dsptech]

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.

dignome,

I have the same setup as you (Matrox G200 PCI) and I have it working in Windows.
I'm trying to get this working in Linux.
So far the best I get is a garbled screen with thick vertical black lines.
I used your XF86Config settings and tried other refresh rates and modelines but it still buggered.
I'm unable to use the Option "UseFBDev" "on" option or else the driver gets unloaded.
The XFree86 log says...
(WW) open /dev/fb1: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb2: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb3: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb4: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb5: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb6: No such device
(WW) open /dev/fb7: No such device
(EE) Unable to find a valid framebuffer device
(EE) MGA(1): Failed to open framebuffer device, consult warnings and/or errors above for possible reasons
(you may have to look at the server log to see warnings)
(II) UnloadModule: "mga"

When loading the mga driver the XFree86 log says...
(--) MGA(1): Chipset: "mgag200 PCI"
(II) Loading sub module "mga_hal"
(II) LoadModule: "mga_hal"
(WW) Warning, couldn't open module mga_hal
(II) UnloadModule: "mga_hal"
(EE) MGA: Failed to load module "mga_hal" (module does not exist, 0)
(==) MGA(1): Matrox HAL module not loaded - using builtin mode setup instead
(**) MGA(1): Depth 16, (--) framebuffer bpp 16
(==) MGA(1): RGB weight 565
(**) MGA(1): Option "HWcursor" "off"
(==) MGA(1): Using AGP 1x mode
(--) MGA(1): Linear framebuffer at 0xDC000000
(--) MGA(1): MMIO registers at 0xE4000000
(--) MGA(1): Pseudo-DMA transfer window at 0xE5000000

I also have an Nvidia 5900XT for my main display and set up my XF86Config for dual screens.
I think I'm I may need to set up a framebuffer?
How does one go about this?
I've checked my .config file and all matroxfb are compiled as modules.
Also the "fbset" commands are not available to me, I get command not found messages.
Maybe it's because I'm running Kernel 2.6.7 with Debian (Mepis) or something?

Please, please, please give me the secrets, the power, and knowledge to succeed in getting this working.

[dignome]

If you do not plan on using the console, and just want to go straight to X, then don't bother with this. (Disable UseFBDev setting) You need to enable the mga framebuffer in the linux kernel if you want to be able to use X and the console with the the lcd display.

If you do not have the kernel module available, you will need to compile a new kernel with the mga framebuffer enabled. Either use the kernel source package provided with your distro, or download one from kernel.org. Find some instructions online for how to configure the kernel and compile it, there are differences between 2.4/2.6 kernels. On 2.6.x kernels enable mga framebuffer by selecting:

Device Drivers->Graphics Support->[*] Support for framebuffer devices
<*> Matrox Acceleration[*] G100/G200/G400/G450/G550 support
You also optionally enable 'Console Display Driver support->Framebuffer console' to take advantage of the framebuffer for console work.

If for whatever reason fb0 is not created in /dev you will need to manually create a node for access to the framebuffer device. Use command 'mknod c 29 x /dev/fbx', where x is the minor number with framebuffer device 1 starting at minor 0.

Basically, once I had the psone lcd working under windows using tweaked settings from 'video arcade' setting within powerstrip, I used the option to convert those settings to XFree config settings. For console settings, I simply used fbset to tweak the screen settings (look in my other posts for details).


If you need more help, provide logs/etc and also mention your distro name as well as kernel version/etc.