First post, by henryVK
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Howdy, friends and neighbours,
now, I've been trying to identify the best solution of swapping the monochrome LCD panel on this little luggable clone for a colour TFT. Well, usually these portable machines (Dolch PAC etc.) have some kind of dedicated PCI card or controller board that drives the TFT. That would be nice to have, since it would mean that the display is connected internaly and there's less messing around, but I don't think I want to wait for the right kinds of spares to show up on eBay/locally.
(There's this card here, but I can't figure out what kind of display it's meant for [22 pin LVDS?] – but if anybody has any idea, I'd still be curious to know if it's a viable solution. I've seen other TFT/PCI card solutions from point-of-sale or industrial displays, but they use these enormous 40 pin external connectors and I've only seen 12" or 15" screens, which would be too big.)
Okay. So, I've found these cheap little 10" IBM displays (here) that might just fit into the case and could just be connected with a VGA ribbon cable and a 90° adapter to the VGA-out – but here's where I have a couple of questions:
- In order to ditch the separate AC adapter, could the display be run off the 12V that come from the PSU? There's these adapters from molex to 5.5mm barrel plug for LEDs and stuff like that.
- Since it's not a native 640x480 screen, would this cause scaling issues with the graphics card?
- This is a very cheap setup; could the display not simply be to... crap... to be worth the effort? They are IBM branded, but who knows.
I guess this last question is anyone's guess.
So, I'd be thrilled to have some advice on this, since I fear to be missing out on either some very obvious problem or obvious and much better solution 😁
Thanks and best regards
Henry