Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny.. (Oh Yeah!)

Since my last post, I've spent a few pennies on eBay to get the project moving, but have hit yet more snags.

Firstly, I wanted to  fix the missing bracket on the video card. I also had an idea of where I'd be going with the targeting computer, so I opted to replace the card entirely, thus swapping the S-Video for an RCA port. There's not much between the options, but as the card (which, by design was another GeForce 7200 GS) was listing at less than £3, I didn't see any harm.

At the same time, I was hoping some extra Memory would alleviate some video issues, so replacing the 256MB module with a 1GB was an easy choice.

The odd thing is, the card needed new (older) drivers to function correctly,
despite the only difference being the presence of the RCA port instead of S-Video.

Now that I had some of the annoyances cleared up, I located my Projector, an old (but still good) Epson EMP S1H. I haven't tested this yet, but I was able to ascertain the maximum resolution is 1024*768. As I intend to use this as the main display device, I've had to drop the in-game resolution from 1920*1080 accordingly. The main issue here, besides the massive drop in display quality, is that the projector has a pretty long throw, so I need to check out the room dimensions to see if this will work as intended.

Last used to throw Pirates of the Caribbean onto a sheet in the Garden!

 

 

Finally, I took the (admittedly cheap) plunge and got myself a 4.3" TFT monitor. At £15 including postage, this little beauty arrived in less than 2 weeks. I have to say, I'm actually really impressed with this. It supports both PAL and NTSC right out of the box, has two RCA video inputs, and automatically turns off with no signal. It's light and at first doesn't feel like it'd last a week, but it's surprisingly well made. It tends to have a bit of a fit every time the resolution changes, but it's not really built for what I'm doing, and I don't have to adjust ANYTHING, it just gets right on with the task.

The Sun Visor, thankfully, just popped right off.

 The monitor is built for use in-car, and as such, the supplied power adapter isn't of any immediate use to me. However, as the device uses a simple DC-12v supply, I was about to jury-rig the cable onto the 12V Rail of a spare MOLEX adapter. As it turned out, whilst looking for an RCA cable, I stumbled upon a spare 10.9v adapter. This does the job just fine.

It's taken me about 4 hours this evening to get everything up again. Every time I change hardware, or system settings, It seems I have to change the display settings, reconfigure the joysticks, and generally piss about. I hope it's worth it.

4.3" TFT cloning the in-game target display.

The two other issues I've hit now, are that the aspect ratio is a little off, and the monitor has a serious flickering issue in-flight. The Ratio I can deal with, the flicker is a deal-breaker at the moment. Cloning works fine until the in-flight engine kicks-in. I will try and work around this for now, the next thing I can try is to upgrade the CPU to a dual core. The worst case scenario here is that I abandon this approach, and mount a second monitor into the dashboard. This way I can use the Geforce screen cloning (which works flawlessly) and just cover any parts of the screen I don't need.

On the plus side, this would give me a screen for my Raspberry Pi :)