Certain OS installers cough*osx*cough don’t like the on-board displays on some machines. [Ziddan] posted a paperclip based work around for them on the eeeuser forums (originally posted by [mugan] on insanelymac). Apparently by shorting the pins, the video card will report that there is an unknown external display attached.
10 thoughts on “Ghost External VGA Display Hack”
Leave a Reply
Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)
But the question remains, why on earth would you want to install OSX on anything but a mac anyway? Hell, for that matter, why would you install it on a mac? Then again there’s always “Because I can.”
I have no idea how it happened but when I tried this mod my xp install got corrupted.
a friend had similar issue but I didn’t, so I told him to use an external monitor instead of the LCD on his laptop.
When I saw the words “ghost” and “VGA” I thought it was going to be something like a prank I pulled on a friend. I soldered tiny chip capacitors inside his vga cable (between the pins of the male connector), and it ghosted the image. I connected two colors together, so the ghosting only occurred with the proper color contrast – straight black and white text was unaffected. It worked for a few days, but the chip capacitors really can’t take any stress, so they broke, and the screen returned to normal. The fact that it fixed itself added to the confusion.
Wow this is old. Been using this trick since early 2006 to install OS X. Most systems don’t need this anymore, only the old cretin ones like mine. Also you only need one of those pins for it to still work. I forget which though.
I had to do this when installing OSX onto my VAIO, but it was a single paperclip between pins 5 and 8.
Wow, my first feature on hackaday :D
This hack was in this case actually unrelated to OSX, other than the fact that i found what i needed on a mac forum.
I havnt tried to install OSX on my EEE.
I was looking into this because a lot of people at the eeeuser forums, myself included.
We were having problems running older games that require 640×480 and the standard driver does not support that resolution.
This hack enables clone mode in the driver and allows us to chose 640×480 either stretched to fit or centered as well as higher resolutions with scrolling on the 800×480 EEE pc monitor.
Nowdays (about 4 months after my post on eeeuser) there are a few different software utilities that surposedly do the same thing as this hack.
I havnt tried any of them so i cant say if they work or not though.
However there are a lot of competent hackers on eeeuser i would be surpriced if someone hasnt found a pure software solution for this.
Thanks and keep on hacking! :)
-Ziddan
It’s not really a good idea to short video outputs straight to ground. It’s better to do it through a resistor. Here are instructions for making a better dummy monitor (this one shorts out the R, G and B lines, rather than just R and B in the original hack):
http://tvtool.info/english/dummy_e.htm
Johhny B goode,Why install OSX? Because the video editing software out there for Linux and windows sucks big time. Under linux Video editing is a raving joke. windows you can buy AVID at least for lots of cash, but anything else is crap.
Final Cut Pro is the ONLY decent video editing app out there. Granted putting this on a EEE is retarded. you need a crapload of processor to do video editing unless you are playing with the kids toy stuff Like Standard Def video (aint it cute) or that crap qvga camera on the eee. If you are doing real video you aint doin it on a eee…
word to ma peeps yo!
This is mostly for installing (older) versions of OSX “hackintosh” builds on notebooks with 910/915 chipsets. I did a similar thing with OSX on my old gimpy notebook, using paperclips in the S-Video port instead, shorting out the pins vertically. Works like a champ, never experienced any damage or popping caps. The only annoying thing about it is that OSX will still perceive an active second screen out of view, so you may loose your pointer every now and then :)