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Home Forums Powerbook 150 - screen is blank — #21 Powerbook 150 - screen is blank — #21
Post #21 by joe4227@sympatico.ca
Source ForumPowerbook 150 - screen is blank — #21
CategoryHardware
Post DateWed, 22 Aug 2012 - 05:19
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/powerbook-150-screen-is-blank.26038/
Post
Some progress!

Apple Developer technote for this machine contains block diagram and describes *some* of the hardware. Found here:

http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/#documentation/Hardware/hardware2.html

It tells us that "The Display is a 9.5-inch flat panel film super twist nematic (FSTN)

dual-scan liquid crystal display (LCD). It provides 640-by-480 2-bit per pixel resolution, is

capable of displaying 4 levels of gray, and has on-demand cold cathode fluorescent lamp

(CCFL) backlighting.

The video implementation on the PowerBook 150 is similar to the video on the

PowerBook Duo 230. The video RAM is a 128K x 8-bit device that stores the data required

to update and refresh the flat-panel video display. The VRAM for the PowerBook 150 is

mapped to locations $6000 0000 through $6080 0000, as it is on

the PowerBook Duo family. The display hardware supports 1-bit and 2-bit per-pixel

grayscale. The value for the PowerBook 150 panel ID is 4."

More importantly, I learned that the "GSC" chip stands for Grey Scale Controller and is actually a Chips and Technology Video Controller chip. In most cases, I think they used the 65525, but I will confirm from the hardware. If that is the case, I have the Application notes with pinouts for that chip, which will tell me the pinouts on the LCD ribbon...

mp.ls