Multiple Monitors for iBooks

nevershower writes "I found this while reading MacOSXHints. It's a firmware script for Radeon iBooks that allows them to use monitor spanning! DO NOT run this script if you have a Rage iBook. It might permanently bork your laptop." Borking is bad, especially if it is permanent.

Comments

Swedish Chef

[Strog]

Mmm Bork Bork Bork.

Funny for Muppets but not funny for your laptop

The meaning of bork

[floydigus]

A quick search on Google returned this site.

you're good.

[Bizzarobot]

This post says "RageM6" looks like what you're supposed to have to enable spanning.
This one tells you how to revert. Good luck!

Whoa, Pete!

[thinmac]

I have a 700Mhz radion iBook, so as soon as I saw this story I rebooted and made the change (it's not so much a script as a list of firmware commands, you have to copy it out or look at them on another machine and enter them by hand). I'm now typing this in on my 21 inch Sony trinitron running at 1600x1200. Works great!
Gotta wonder, though. Apple really has limited the use of this radion chip. They disable this, and it only came with 16 megs of vram. Chip supports up to 64! If it only came with 16 more, it would be a pretty able 3d card (not that it's terrible now, just somewhat underpowered). How much would an extra 16 megs cost?

Re:Whoa, Pete!

[scotto]

Apple can't make the iBook too good relative to the PowerBook G4, or it's low price would cannibalize sales from their premium laptop. That's why monitor spanning is disabled and they only put 16MB of RAM in it.

Is it possible to do the "reverse" on an iMac

[automandc]

In the same vein, does anyone know if it's possible to use the built in LCD panel on an iMac as a monitor for a different computer (i.e. a "video-in" for the iMac monitor)?

I realize that it is probably a hardware hack, but if anyone has ever done this I'd be interested to hear. One of my major reasons for not getting a Mac is that I can't justify (afford) a G4 standalone, but I don't want two monitors on my desk unless I can use both of them simultaneously.

Get your terminology right

[azav]

The term "Monitor spanning" does not apply to macintoshes since you are NOT spanning one screen to multiple monitors.

The correct term is "multiple monitor support" because the macintosh has been built with support for multiple monitors from day two.

Please use the correct terminology.

Re:Get your terminology right

[Steve Cowan]

The problem is that "multiple monitor support" is an ambiguous term. The iBook has multiple monitor support - you can plug in a VGA monitor and have it display the same thing that's on your built-in display. In Apple parlance it's mirroring, but technically it is still multiple monitor support.

On their web site, Apple has referred to monitor spanning as both "extended desktop" and "dual display".

Now I just wish somebody could come up with a hack for my RAGE iBook 500.

Works a treat...

[Colitis]

Was easily done, and now I have monitor spanning enabled and working fine. No obvious problems with apps yet.

I only have a 15" LCD so I can't try what happens when the external screen has higher res than the built-in one, but with both displays in the same res I'm quite happy.

(this is on my 700MHz iBook with Radeon chipset).

Quartz Extreme probably won't work

[drsmithy]

Be aware that using spanning will disable QE. Assuming the iBook is like my (Rev A 667) TiBook, when display spanning is used the 16MB of VRAM on the chip is split into 8MB per display, which isn't enough for QE.

Re:Apple Laptop Keyboards Unsuitable for Unix User

[tm2b]

I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key.

Oh, please. It means nothing of the sort - different Unix vendors have been placing the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys in different places for years. Look at, say, 15 years ago - 1987 - DEC keyboards, IBM RT keyboards, Sun2 keyboards, and (the upcoming) Sun 3 keyboards were very different.

A truly long-time Unix user (vs. a "my favorite vendor's Unix" user) would be used to adapting to different keyboards and would get on to truly important personal preference wars, like emacs vs. vi, X11 vs. WM, or the OTBS.

Re:Hmmm

[fader]

I have a 14" 700Mhz iBook. Unfortunately it reports "ATY,RageM6" on the Apple System Profiler. Should I risk running the script?

Well, I wouldn't want to be responsible for telling you to try something risky with your laptop... but having said that, I saw this on MacOSXHints.com last night. I have a 12" 700Mhz iBook, which reported the same video card. But I tried the hack anyway, and it works perfectly. I can't believe Apple didn't enable this on the iBooks that support it.

The funniest thing is, the video card supports waaay higher resolutions than the laptop display will do, so you can slam on an external monitor and have a decent desktop size when you're at your desk.