Setting up a TV screen as an External Monitor

[shu77]

In another Thread recently I published a picture of my external screen

I had a question about the parts involved so I thought I would publish the part list for people that are interested.

The Screen itself is a 3.5" Reversing screen. Theres dozens of thes eon Ebay for $20-$30. Theres also 4.5" versions for those that want a little extra size.

Monitor

These are designed to be powered by a Car battery or reversing light current, however a little testing found that a 12V 1Amp powersupply from an old phone charger was sufficient to power it.

The challenge with the screen is then interfacing it to the game. I tried a couple of adapters to run Composite-> VGA without any luck so ended up with one of these.

Convertor

This takes a standard VGA signal and converts it to a Composite or RCA feed. This particular model happily does 1024x768 in 32 Bit colour, which obviouslt is a bit hard to read on the screen. For my purposes I wanted to set it right down so went with 640x480 which is the smallest the video card would give.

 

Finally you want to get the new screen working with the old screens.

Theres a trick to this which isnt immediately obvious. If you look at the back of a ATI 5870 Card you see 2 DVI connectors a HDMI and a displayport. You would think that means 4 monitors, however its not the case. You actually need a special monitor with a native display port, or an "Active" display port adapter.

I ended up getting one of these

Adapter

 

This takes a USB port to inject power into the DVI stream to make the Video card think its an active monitor somehow. The other thing I discovered in doing this is that the monitor must be natively DVI, you cannot use a DVI-VGA convertor.

 

Once you have this on one screen you can run 3 screens together and this gives you the following setup.

Hope this proves useful to someone.

[Phantom_Mark]

I hate myself for asking this as it will probably be a dumb question.

 

Is this a cheap way of putting a display behind my tm mfd's ??

 

I use a Dell 2407 monitor ATM with a 480gtx gpu.

 

Looking for the cheapest possible way to have a display for my mfd's.

 

Thanks mate

[shu77]

Check my 'my Rig' link in my sig then check the multi-monitor thread in the DCS technical support forum.

[shu77]

I'd also suggest ebay to find an LCD screen, you can normally find an old 17" or a 19" pretty cheap

[Succellus]

This look like having an awesome potential for screen of the instrument that is on the right console (forgot the name).

BTW you were making test when you got the pictures ? Your system looks quite chaotic with instruments everywhere.

[shu77]

I haven't quite finished with the HawgTouch set up on the left panel, That left screen is new so Im still working through the best use for it.

[Mr_Burns]

Do you know if it possible to export the AWACS - F12 map to that small screen?

[TulsA-10]

What res are you using in dcs? Is it 4490x1080 .. example 2x 1920x1080 plus alittle extra for the cdu screen. I'm trying to figure out your in game res plus your export for the cdu sceen..

 

I'm wanting to make a cdu so i need to find a way to export the cdu display on to a small lcd. I can configure all the buttons, just the screen is what i need help with.