Can a PBG4/500 Be Run Without The Standard LCD?

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SpaceBoy's picture
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Can a PBG4/500 Be Run Without The Standard LCD?

Howdy, folks!
I'm most of the way through a very cool hack involving the guts of a PowerBook G4/500 and a beautiful 1942 Westinghouse tabletop stereo. To sum it up, tomorrow is my fiancé's birthday, and she's been wanting a Mac to learn Final Cut Pro on, so I'm using all the parts from the PowerBook and mounting them inside the wonderfully 'art decco'-style Westinghouse case. So far, so good - I've got the wooden care nicely restored, with a bit of paint to bring out the curves. On the technical side, I recently bought a busted PowerBook G4/500 for its case, as my PB500 took a terrible fall which left it's case badly cracked. The PB that I bought for parts had suffered a broken screen (apparently, a 3-year-old had tried folding the screen all the way backwards till it touched the bottom of the case - ouch!), but much to my delight, other than the screen's backlight being broken (and the screen hinges being trashed), the computer works well, and the screen even works, if you put it under a bright enough light.
Anyway, here's my problem: The PRAM battery in this 'Book is shot, so when I do manage to (using a flashlight on the busted screen) turn on video mirroring, it works perfectly with my CRT... until the system is shut down, at which point it defaults to the LCD as the primary display, and the external as secondary.
What I'm looking for is a quick-and-dirty AppleScript to simply enable video mirroring at boot-up.
Anyone up to the challenge?
Thanks!
Huxley
huckdunsany@mac.com
PS As soon as the project is done, I'll post pics - it's purty! Smile

Jasoco's picture
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I believe it should work fine

I believe it should work fine. I don't think the computer really relies on an internal LCD being connected. I could be wrong, but you should be able to easily remove the built-in from the connnectors and as long as Mirroring is on, it will work.

What I'm afraid of is that when the battery goes again, the display will revert back to the non=existant internal.

SpaceBoy's picture
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Solution

Well, I found a much easier solution to my question - instead of trying to get AppleScript to set the mirroring prefs at startup (which was proving to be rather tough), I found out that by simply pressing "command+F1", mirroring will be turned on! Whee! I love easy answers!
Thanks for the help,
Huxley

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Another note

If you keep the lid of a powerbook closed while a keyboard, mouse, power supply, and external monitor are attached it'll automatically disable output to the LCD. (The power supply is necessary to keep it from going into sleep mode.)

Anyway. If you're building the guts of the machine into something else intending to use it as a desktop machine you can fake the lid-closed switch out with a magnet, allowing you to detatch the lid entirely.

--Peace

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