On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:11:36 -0400 "Oscilated" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have an original boxed G-400 Dual Head. The product came with this > cable you are talking about. All the cable does is turn the standard > 15-pin VGA signal into appropriate signals for hookup to a television by > either RCA or S-Video. There is no driver support necessary to output > via the cable; however, the video driver must be able to drive the card > at the appropriate frequency for your application (hookup to TV). You couldn't be more misleading. The output cable is just connectors and wire. I built my own, from connectors and wire and a little solder and some heat-shrink tubing. It does nothing but connect some pins on the DB15HD to an RCA connector and S-Video connector. Or a SCART connector, if that's your bag and you wanna build one. *Software, whether you call it a driver or not, is required to set the appropriate mode on the card to output a usable signal though the connectors you have attached. It's not active software - the card itself does all the heavy lifting - maybe that's why you don't call it a driver. But it is very much required in order to set up the card so it can do the heavy lifting for you. In the bad old days, it was the way you seem to state. Somewhere deep in a box I have a little black dingus called a "Game Zapper" or something similarly vague which was capable of converting a VGA signal to composite video. It required that you be able to set your sync rates really low. Which, in DOS, did not require driver support, but required that the CRTC actually be capable of doing it. The setup software for the device would make a VGA bios call to select the mode it wanted, and a lot of the time, it simply wouldn't work because the card couldn't do it. IIRC, it may have included a TSR which tried to prevent your game from undoing it, but I just don't remember and don't care. The G400-DH supports TV-Out in hardware, and if you had the inkling to do so, you could run bare wire from your TV to the DB15HD and get video - but only AFTER you set up CRTC2 to do it. This is UNlike the ATi boards, VIA MiniITX boards, etc, where tv-out is defaulted if VGA is not connected at boot time. The G400 defaults to VGA out on the first head and nothing out on the 2nd head in all boot configurations. Software (e.g. 'drivers') is required for all 2nd head output, including tv-out. The reason the G400 is good at it, and the reason the G400 is fiddly to program when doing this, is that the chips on the board do a lot of things to the signal that the old GameZapper type device and most tv-out features on video cards just don't do. This is also why it only works on the dual head card. The regular version doesn't have the parts for it. > To now answer your next question... Yes, the Linux driver supports > driving the card at NTSC frequencies (I live in US, so I have no idea > about PAL). NTSC and PAL modes are available on the same card. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4721&alloc_id=10040&op=click _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
