atitvout 0.4 - Linux ATI TV Out Support Program
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Copyright 2002
Lennart Poettering <[email protected]>

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This utility program may be used for executing several configuration
commands for the TV Out connector of ATI Rage Mobility P/M graphics
boards under GNU/Linux on x86. It is intended primarily to enable TV
Out support after bootup and for switching the used TV standard from
NTSC to PAL.

The utility makes use of x86-VESA-BIOS-calls and thus is not portable
to other architectures like PPC: *No TV-Out on Macs with this tool*.

Please Notice
-------------

*Notice*: I do not answer any questions related to Microsoft Windows and ATI's own drivers on that OS.

*Notice*: I don't know where to get the newest ATI drivers for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP.

*Notice*: I silently ignore HTML mail.

*Notice*: I do not answer any questions related to XFree86 configuration files.

*Notice*: No, I have no "working modeline" for you.

*Notice*: No, there is no chance to get this tool to work on PPC. It's x86-only.

Usage
-----

For usage info try "atitvout help". I normally run the utility with
"atitvout pal auto". This switches to PAL for german TVs and enables
the TV out, when available.

Supported Devices
-----------------

I developed this tool on an ATI Rage Mobility P/M, but I added support
for other devices like the Radeon, the Rage 128, Mobility M3, Mobility
M4.

BUT DON'T FORGET: THE RAGE MOBILITY P/M IS THE ONLY ADAPTER ON WHICH
THE UTILITY IS KNOWN TO WORK. ON ALL OTHER ADAPTERS YOUR MILEAGE MAY
VARY.

Rage Mobility P/M and Mobility M3/M4 differ.

The PCI info of my Rage Mobility follows:

<pre>
[lennart@whiskey] ~$ /sbin/lspci -vs 1:0.0

	VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
	Subsystem: FIRST INTERNATIONAL Computer Inc: Unknown device 1730
	Flags: bus master, stepping, medium devsel, latency 66, IRQ 5
	Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
	Memory at fc100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
	Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: <available only to root>

[lennart@whiskey] ~$ 
</pre>

The program should work at least on those graphics cards which share
the same PCI info with mine. My card is built into a laptop from
Aldi/Medion. (http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/aldi/)

Notes
-----

When using the ati driver of XFree 4.1 you should rerun this utility
always after having changed the screen resolution with C-A-+ or
C-A--. Otherwise the displays may go nuts.

As ATI denied to supply me with documentation about the TV Out
interface of their cards and I do not have a ATI Radeon or Rage 128 I
cannot fix my utility so that it works correctly on all these
devices. Thus the support for these devices is rather limited and may
be broken. Please try to run 'test.sh' and have an eye an all your
attached displays, if you experience failures. For better support on
non-Mobility-P/M-devices you need to fix the utility yourself.

Not all ATI adapters support all of these commands. Please try them
all before complaining.

Most cards do not allow to activate non attached displays. All calls
to atitvout will fail if you try to enable displays which do not show
up in 'atitvout detect'.

Not all adapters seem to support simultaneously using TV and LCD/CRT
from within Linux. Thus 'lt' (resp. 'ct') may fail, while 'l' (resp. 'c')
and 't' succeed. In this case 'auto' will fail too. In fact 'auto'
works only on very few adapters.

Development
-----------

Development was done under Debian GNU Linux Sid for i386 from January
2002. The used machine was a Medion 9580-F laptop with an ATI Rage
Mobility P/M graphics board.

Installation
------------

Run "make" for compiling the program. You might want to install it
permanently on your system by issuing "make install" as root. This
installs the atitvout executable to /usr/local/sbin/. For removing this
installation you might want to try "make deinstall" as root.

Internet
--------

You may find up to date releases of this utility on
	http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/projects/atitvout/

You may download this release from
	http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/projects/atitvout/atitvout-0.4.tar.gz

Thanks go to
------------

Leif Delgass for supplying me with information about ATI VBE calls

Nick Kurshev for a Radeon/R128 related patch

Stefan Raspl for a ATI Mobility Radeon related patch

Josh Vanderhoof for developing LRMI

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Lennart Poettering <[email protected]>, 2002