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repairedCheese

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 13, 2020
655
850
So, here's a bit of a new one, at least for me. My eMac has decided its screen no longer works. Oh, that sounds normal enough, but there was no obvious failure event. I've had enough crts to really expect them to fail more obviously. This thing just didn't turn back on after being put to sleep. I've tried everything to bring the screen back to life, booting to different operating systems, resetting pram, and all that. Even got a mini vga to vga adapter which only really works with a crt monitor due to the odd output signal, but through that, everything works just fine, through what I understood to be screen mirroring. There's no smell or extra heat, either. I'm guessing a capacitor blew somewhere in the crt circuitry, and that's a little beyond my skills, but if there's anything else I might have missed, I'm all ears.
 
I'm well aware, which is why I haven't tried to take it apart. What I did get lucky with was that I had a monitor that could handle the output of its gpu, I've thrown several at it, and only one old kind of fuzzy Dell beige 17" seems up for it. That has opened up the option of using it like it's just another G4, and it's good to know for sure that the computer itself does still work, but I can't say the effort to save it would be worth the risks, not to mention the skill, parts, and tools I don't have.

And despite everything, I'd still want to keep it around, just because it's still a 700mhz G4 with 1gb of ram, that can run OS 9. Right now is kind of not an opportune moment to try to find a replacement.
 
What mode is the GPU outputting right now? A 1280x1024 or better LCD might handle its maximum 1280x960@75Hz.

I was going to suggest Screen Spanning Doctor to enable dual-head modes and more fine-grained control of the VGA output but it's incompatible. :(
 
But how many can do 1280x960 at 72hz? 1152x864 at 80hz? 1024x768 at 89hz? 800x600 at 112hz? And, incredibly, 640x480 at 138hz? I'm really starting to think I got incredibly lucky I had a monitor that could handle any of that, never mind all of it. And these are locked frequences, too. The eMac can only mirror, it can't do independent resolutions and frequencies. It's an odd choice, and one that feels a lot less forward thinking nearly 20 years on.
 
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