Ini settings for image

[kwodkore]

Hi all, having a bit of a nightmare getting an image to display from the MiSTer to my Dell 1704fpt monitor, I am ideally trying to use my DVI to HDMi cable but also a VGA to VGA I have tried does not display anything but a blank screen, I know the monitor and cables are fine as have checked other random consoles on them but just having a pickle with the MiSTer, can somebody please relay to me the exact ini.settings I should be using to get going with this, it's a 1280x1024 resolution if that helps, many thanks...

[kwodkore]

Just to add all the dip switches are in correct position and I have actually got to the menu screen on another random hd portable TV just using HDMI to HDMI, this is why I take it to be something with the ini. settings that needs configuring

[Malor]

Ick. That monitor is pushing twenty years old, and it may not talk well with the Mister's standard output. That was still early in the transition from CRT to LCD, and a lot of those LCD monitors didn't work all that well. They could be particularly troublesome with nonstandard/non-VGA timings, which the Mister board outputs quite frequently, because that's what the real hardware did, in many cases.

The very first thing you should do is make sure that the Mister is actually putting out video. Do you have any other devices you can connect to ensure that you can see the Mister video menu? (edit: I see you answered that while I was writing this.)

Once you know the Mister is putting out video, then the next thing is to try to configure it to put out a signal your LCD understands. The easiest way to do this will probably be via SSH. If you can connect to the machine via SSH, you can navigate to /media/fat/Scripts, and then run the 'update_ini.sh" script that's in there. The very first option is video_mode, which I believe is what the menu itself will put out. Pick the biggest size that will fit on your monitor, save, reboot, and see if you get a signal.

If you do, then you'll probably want to adjust the next two settings the same way. IIUC, video_mode_ntsc is used for NTSC cores, and video_mode_PAL is used for PAL cores. You'll want to set those to something your monitor understands as well.

You may want to set refresh_max to 60, because it's unlikely your LCD will go any faster than that, and you may want "dvi_mode" set to ON.

You can also try the various settings under vsync_adjust. Low lag is what you normally want, but that's less compatible than the other two options. Note that it's quite likely that your LCD is very laggy compared to a CRT. Those early Dells were kind of a crapshow. I had a 2407 from a few years later that looked great, but had like five frames of lag. The color was awesome for the time, but wow, was it bad for twitch gaming.

[kwodkore]

Thank you for being so honest and giving me some options, I will give it all another crack later, I heard the Dell 2007/2001FB monitors were pretty cool with the MiSTer and although my model isn't one of them it is in that Ultrasharp family and something I thought would initially be the next best thing to a crt, tbh a friend gave it to me as it had been in his attic for a spell so no big loss, it is immaculate as well

[kwodkore]

Just to let you know I managed to fiddle around with the ini. settings a bunch and finally got an image going on the Dell, hopefully no more hiccups going forward, many thanks...

[Malor]

That's good to hear.

You might want to post the settings you ended up using, so that someone searching for answers later on can see them. Don't be DenverCoder9.