[rescue] Octane Needs (was Re: SGI goodies anyone?)

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 16 Oct 2010, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:

>> I have at least one of those I could part with, maybe two soon, but mine
>> are Sun, and I understand Sun and SGI do not use the same 13W3 pinouts.
>
> I had thought the pin outs were the same but Sun used a separate sync
> pin that SGI left unused?

Not quite.  The SGIs use those pins for monitor identification and other
DDC-like things, which can give you all sorts of headaches if your display
"knows" how to handle sync information on those pins.

For example, I had an IBM P201 monitor (excellent display, by the way),
which could handle sync-on-green, composite-sync, and component-sync.
Plugging it into a (sync-on-green) SGI framebuffer left me with a garbled
display because the SGI left the "sync" pins neither grounded nor
floating.  I solved the problem by taking a pair of side-cutters to those
pins on the display cable.

You can pull a similar trick to get a Sun display to work on a PC that
only sends out component sync information.  Break it out to 5BNC, T-couple
together the sync-pins, and break it back into 13W3 with a 4BNC cable and
some barrel-connectors.

I'd love to find an LCD analogue to that P201--understands everything,
looks great, and gracefully puts up with all sorts of noisy out-of-band
garbage.  The Dell 2001FP is close, but they're getting harder to find....

-- 
Jonathan Patschke |
Elgin, TX         | "He who is contented is rich." -- Lao Tzu
USA               |