Diagonal lines on composite tv-out

[ErsatzTom]

So I finally got everything pretty much setup the way I want it on my htpc box and moved it from my office into my livingroom and hooked it up to my tv. This is the first time I've viewed the tv-out on it and it was pretty disappointing. I'm sure I can get many aspects of the picture looking better by playing with both the overall and overlay brightness/contrast/etc settings but the real problem is that there are sort of faint diagonal lines through the whole picture. They are their regardless of what is displayed. I tried changing cables, moving things around, hooking up directly to the tv instead of through the receiver but nothing helps. My tv-out is composite, and I know that s-video is generally better, but I have just about everything else hooked up via composite and nothing else has this problem. Does my video card just have poor tv-out or could there be some other problem?

The card is a PowerColor Radeon 9600SE (low profile) in an abit uATX motherboard with an 865 chipset and a 2.8GHz P4 in an Antec Minuet case running WinXP Pro. I've played with the various tv-out specific settings in the ATI control panels. When I installed the card I used the latest release (non-beta) ATI drivers downloaded from ATI. I doesn't seem like you can really tweak the output much on the tv-out?

Would I be better off with one of the vga to s-video converters out there? It seems like you can pick one up for ~$50 if you look around. I tried to get a picture of the screen to show my problem but monitors are hard to photograph. I'll try again tomorrow. I'd really appreciate any help I can get!

t

[ErsatzTom]

I noticed another interesting (but almost certainly unrelated) thing with this card while investigating the problem. While googling (wow, BTW, my spelling checker recognized that as word) around for info on this I found some pages on reading/editing/flashing ATI bios. I download some of the progs just to take a look and see if anything was out of whack and I'm pretty sure I found the reason that the video rolls and has color problems during startup (didn't mention this as I figured it was unrelated configuration issue). According to the bios editor (read caveat below) the default format on the card is PAL (and I'm in the US). However, and this is a pretty big however, RadEdit (which definitely seems to be of non-US origin) complains about the checksum on the bios I pulled from the card with WinFlash. So I am thinking it is possible that PAL is possibly the default for RadEdit and it couldn't read the format correctly in the bios maybe? The other info, like the card version, looks legit.

So, does anyone have any experience with flashing ATI bios settings? I definitely don't feel comfortable flashing a bios edited with a program that doesn't like the checksum on the bios I pulled off the card. Maybe I would have better luck with flashrom under dos than WinFlash? I was using that because I don't have a floppy in my Minuet case but I have a usb floppy for my laptop that I know that computer will boot off of so maybe I will do that. I'll have to drag it back into my office, though, to plug it into a real monitor since the video will be unusable (I'm pretty sure) under dos. I'd really like to get rid of the rolling/b&w video during boot but I don't want to toast the card.

Any advice?

t

[gplasky]

Haven't had a reason to flash a vid card. Read some postings on the Rage3d forums. Sucesses and horror stories abound. Definitely recommend doing from a dos boot and not a Windows utility. Here is an ATIFlash utility link. Keep in mind the .bin file is for a 9700. I would think you just need to find the appropriate .bin file for your card. It also saves a copy of your current bios so you should be able to go back to the default bios.

Good luck.


ATIFlash utility


Gerry

[ErsatzTom]

Thanks. I'll give it a try under dos and see what I get.

Anybody have any input on my PQ problems? Do you need images to understand what I am talking about? Thanks!

t