On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Trevor Boicey wrote: > That would be my first choice, to just use normal > X windows with NTSC timings fed via a Modeline. > > Does anyone know if this can be made to work on my hardware > though, an ATI 3D Rage II with TV-out? I was only able > to get X to work via the FB. > > Part of the trick seems to be the TV-out portion which > I don't fully control. If you boot it up with the monitor > unplugged, the card initializes the TV-out and sends the > bootup screens there, and then the virtual consoles end up > there, so the framebuffers will work there. > > Is there a way to boot it up this way and get normal X > to output on the TV-out plugs? > > That would solve so many problems. I'm pretty familiar with all this for the Voodoo3 card, which uses a bt869 chip to do the TV out. The lm-sensors package includes a driver for this chip. The driver supports 640x480 and 800x600 modes. I was able to extend the driver to also do 720x576 without overscan compensation - which works nicely for video applications. Of course, its necessary to use "just the right" X modeline. If your card uses this chip, then perhaps I can help directly. If your card does its TV-out using a chip that doesn't have a Linux driver, then your choices are more limited. First, of course, you could write a driver. Second choice if you can't get any control over the TV-out except what the video bios does itself at boot up, would be to establish exactly what the "modeline" parameters are for the character mode your system starts in - 720x400 character mode? And to create a clone in graphics mode for X. This may or may not work - could be difficulties with the colour depth. Do you know what chip is on your card? > Alternatively, if the SIS card can do this with TV-out > right now it might make more sense for me to just switch > to that card instead... or whatever card will work. Alan seems to have the sis working. I have the Voodoo working. G400 works (G450 doesn't though). Another technique that I've had working is to output RGB directly to the TV. For Europe a VGA to SCART connection with a teeny bit of electronics to handle the syncs does the job. For this to work you need a card that can do low enough clocks to make a PAL/NTSC raster. If your card won't do interlacing (few modern ones do) then you'll be limited to half the number of lines. I made this work with a laptop (forget the video chip) but couldn't get it working with a G450 - couldn't clock slow enough. Regards, Steve Davies
