iMac 17-LCD Monitor-Spanning HOW TO!!!

[Petacon]

The Patch

Since this patch is done in Open Firmware you have to boot your iMac with pressed Command-, Option-, O- and F-keys.

At the command line prompt you have to enter the lines exactly as they appear in the gray box below (including spaces and quotation marks).

_ means you have to press the space bar.
return means you have to press the return or enter key.
ctrl-c means you have to press the ctrl- and the c-key.
00000000 are eight zeros, not o's!

Caution: The command line doesn't interpret international keyboard layouts. If you use a keyboard version other than English you might have to press other keys to achieve the appropriate character.

Please note that you won't get any feedback after you enter the 2nd and 3rd line. The line will just appear cleared. That is normal behavior (it's like a text editor that only displays one line so after a carriage return you will be at the next line which will be empty until you type something).

Boot
Command + Option + O + F
1 nvedit return
2 "_/"_select-dev return
3 00000000_"_graphicoptions"_get-my-property_2drop_! return
4 ctrl-c
5 nvstore return
6 setenv_use-nvramrc?_true return
7 reset-all return

The last command will restart your iMac. Now you can connect a second monitor and get monitor spanning.

 

[rice_web]

Just a quick question(s):

Which models will this work with? Is it simply the 17" version?

 

[benixau]

by the looks of the code, it will work on all version released after the 17" was. It only tells the hardware to treat the internal display adapter as a second port rather than a mirrored one. one wrning though, it may be because of the G4mx. a G2mx in the 15" models may not be able to handle the two monitors.

no worries though, if it dont work then you just zap your pram (i forget the shortcut) and all wil be normal again --- as long as you havent zaped your graphics card.

To help, reset your display to 640x480 when you go to trial this. it will help.