Problem with second display (PowerBook)

[taticassel]

Hello all!

On Ebay, I bought a used PowerBook Pismo G3 laptop to run old pre-OSX games. It seems to work wonderfully however I encountered an issue with the second display output. This problem is present both when using VGA and S-Video.

It's hard to explain so I've included two comparison screenshots below, but when the image on the screen needs to change/be updated, only portions of the image do so. The image to the right shows the problem.

I'd like to stress that this ONLY happens on the second display. The built-in monitor shows the game as it is meant to be.

I grew up on PC and this is my first experience with OS9 so forgive me if there's an easy fix for this, I just don't know it.

(Apologies if something is unclear or poorly written in the text. I had a better post on another site but they decided to delete it for some reason... >.>)

 

[val1984]

Is the second display an LCD display?
If yes, there should a button or an option in the screen menus to auto detect settings so that the screen is well adjusted to the VGA analog input (it seems to be the problem from what I see on your screenshots).

 

[taticassel]

Hi, thanks for your reply! And sorry for the late response.

Well for this capture, it's plugged into an Elgato HD capture card via S-Video, so aside from changing the resolution on the laptop there's not much I can do I don't think.

And in regard to the LCD TV, the only options I can find are the standard color correction, screen stretching, etc.

The Laptop recognizes the TV plugged in and I can change the output resolution and Hz. But other than what is on the laptop, there don't seem to be options on either the capture card or the TV.

Edit: I also just tried using a "Sewell PC to TV converter" (VGA -> RCA) and while the picture looks a good deal better, same problem.

 

[bunnspecial]

What is the resolution of your TV?

I think that what you may be running into is a hardware limitation of the GPU in the Pismo. The desktop Rage 128(with 16mb VRAM) is actually only capable of driving 1 display. I'm not surprised that the Rage 128 Mobility with 8mb VRAM struggles with running two displays, especially with something at least mildly graphically intensive.

I might suggest moving up to a Titanium Powerbook if you want to run extended/mirrored displays for something like this. In particular, the DVI models get you much better GPUs. The earlier of the two(667mhz or 800mhz) gets you a Radeon 7000 and the later(867mhz/1ghz) get you a Radeon 9000. The 1ghz model also gets you 64mb VRAM.