In older QNX4+Photon application we changed monitor for today’s widescreen LCD NEC MultiSync EA244WMi - through standard analog D-sub connection.
Photon graphics works OK, but when the machine is starting in QNX text mode the monitor writes “D-SUB OUT OF RANGE”. It seems that the refresh rate for standard text mode is set by QNX OS too high or so.
Is there a solution for that? I mean a way to force QNX4 OS text mode lower refresh rate?
Thank you.
Do the BIOS message appear properly?
Ooops, that’s the right question. If I remember - no POST/BIOS texts after turning the machine on or restarting it! Only switching to graphics mode (Photon microGUI Logon popup window in the middle of the screen) wakes the monitor up.
Next time I’ll be at the plant (in several days I think) I will explore it deeper. If it is even possible to see BIOS Setup screens after entering BIOS Setup while starting the machine.
And then what could be the reason for non-displaying even BIOS POST texts after starting the PC?
My guess is that refresh is too slow for the new monitor. In any case the monitor can’t sync with the text mode. When you start QNX 4 without Photon, I don’t think the console driver changes the video mode. It probably just checks whether there is a monochrome or vga monitor, which indicates where the memory map is.
So I experimented at the plant: no BIOS POST texts after setting the PC on, but if I press , then the BIOS Setup screens (kind of pseudo graphic) are displayed OK.
And when I change the BIOS Setup Setting: “Skip some POST tests - display OEM Logo”, the graphic OEM logo is displayed OK.
It seems, that integrated graphics of that industrial PC (All-in-one industrial CPU card, called SBC) behaves in plain text mode a kind of strange?
Next time I will try another LCD monitor if it would behave the same.
So I tried several other LCD monitors (classic 4:3, 5:4 and widescreen too) and all were good - displaying the QNX4 text mode OK.
It seems that the problem is in the new NEC MultiSync EA244WMi LCD monitor, which is not able to display QNX4 text mode through classic analog VGA cable. I have never seen that problem before… strange.
I have run into a situation using an SBC where the refresh rate was also too low – 50 Hz – and the only monitors I could find that could display it were CRT types. I still have a CRT on hand just for that purpose. The problem is actually with the video driver on the Linux version I am using. On a few of the boards I went with a newer version of Linux and I am able to use better refresh rates. It wasn’t an SBC board limitation in my case. On both versions the BIOS screens and post-BIOS graphic show up, but after that the older Linux version loses video.