I am planning a hardware hac involving a VGA monitor (pulled from a early iMac) and would like to know if there is any way to connect the disembodied monitor's VGA plug to something and get a video signal from either firewire or DVI (preferrably firewire). I would like to do either video mirroring or extended desktop. I need to know what hardware I would need to make this happen.
--DDTM
Assuming it is actually functioning as a monitor, DVI will work, but you will need a DVI to VGA adapter along the lines of this one. Also, IIRC the early iMacs have the wider Mac non-VGA plugs on the end, so you would need an adapter like these to adapt that.
AFAIK, Firewire is a no-go.
As has been discussed many a time on the old Applefritter forums, that the monitor built into iMacs is *not* a full-featured VGA multisync monitor. It's fixed-frequency, and would frankly be something of a pain in the a** to use it with anything else.
(It requires non-standard horizontal and vertical sync timings, and won't lock onto normal "VESA" video modes.)
--Peace
Good to know.
...what should/could I use to drive a video signal to it?
In principle, most video cards *should* be able to drive it. The problem is getting the card to produce a mode the monitor would like. If you were driving it from a PC, for instance, you could probably use a utility such as "Powerstrip":
http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm
Under Windows to program a custom video mode.
And of course, if you're a Linux/Unix/etc user, you could *probably* use the iMac-approprate "Modelines" provided with PPC Linux distributions to set up appropriate X and framebuffer consoles.
(One minor problem of course is that the monitor *won't* work until the OS has booted far enough to load your custom driver/modelines. So you'll be flying blind through the initialization stages.)
And, no, I don't know of a MacOS equivilent of "Powerstrip". It may exist, of course.
--Peace