It looks great!! Turns out the display didn’t even fit!! So now i’m back to square 1
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iBook Clamshell Keyboard swap?
- Thread starter InsightsIE
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Hmm, no, I just plugged and played ... Didn't bother about NTSC/PAL-selection at all with any of our Mac or Win-PC that were connected to our old flatscreen-TV (PAL).
Logically and architecturally speaking, the ATI Rage 128 card in the Rev. C models is identical to the Rage 128 card bundled in the first-gen PowerBook G4s — and all have the same 8MB VRAM.
The difference is Jobs/Apple never planned for the clamshell design to accommodate a display-out port (S-Video, DVI, VGA, or otherwise, as with the PowerBook G4) — discrete from the 3.5-to-RCA composite video cable solution added to Rev. C.
By “not planned”, there isn’t a call-out on the clamshell logic board for future accommodation of a discrete video output (to permit more than just mirroring) the way Rev. A and B boards had a place reserved for future FireWire port inclusion and higher onboard RAM (which, in the end, was never implemented).
Actually, once you grit your teeth and pull the top lid off, that is the worst of the job and subsequent ingresses are easier. Dismantling a Clamshell is laborious but not that bad compared with an iBook or PowerBook G4. The opaque SE versions have tougher and more flexible plastics, so I would be somewhat more careful with the earlier translucent Clamshells. Those are easier to crack.
Looks great but image is cropped in? Oooh I was mostly wanting to do it to capture retro gameplay footage...
The display will fit. You need to remove the shielding cage from the Clamshell first. That will make the positioning of the replacement panel a little trickier to align just right as you would see from my notes when I did it. You still have the issue of the cable, however.
I did warn you but if you looked at my post from way back when, that was also the case then. Not only a different connector but the positioning of the cable on the donor panel was less than ideal for the Clamshell. Still not an insurmountable hurdle. The connector is the real sticking point.
This is because the displays built into the iBook clanshell series were handled by three different vendors (to keep up with consumer demand), and all three vendors used different connections on the cable to the display itself.
Most common among these three were the Samsung display connector. This connector differed from the second-most common display, supplied by IBM. The least common of these was the LG display, whose cable connector used the same 20-pin LVDS connector found on later, higher-resolution displays. Apple supplied three different cables for these three different displays. The spare part from Apple for this LG cable connecting end (or, for that matter, the other two variants) has been unavailable for an extremely long time.
If you’re merely swapping one iBook clamshell display for another in the iBook clamshell series, then it’s important to verify that you’re sticking with the same manufacturer of the display so that the display cable remains compatible. With my own iBook clamshells, most have been Samsung-based, and one was IBM-based. You should be able to use a utility like SwitchRes X to find which manufacturer your clamshell uses, or if you’ve already disassembled it, then you’ll be able to know which display manufacturer was used.
I have yet to run across any LG-based displays in the wild. The cable I used to migrate my Samsung-based display to an LG monitor on my key lime clamshell involved a lot of reading through display schematics and soldering together a kludge between a donor Samsung display connector (on the logic board end) and a donor LG LVDS display connector on the other end. I wouldn’t recommend this path unless one is really into digging through stuff and doing a lot of fine-wire soldering.