Starting Over

As much as I hate to say it, I'm calling it quits on this LCD path.

Where I'm coming from:
When I started this project more than a 18 months ago, nobody had gotten very far on this mod. I could only find one person who had gotten it to work with the native display, and it required the purchase of a $70 video driver that I wasn't sure was going to work. So I went my own rout and set about replacing the LCD panel itself and replacing the iMac's custom inverter to one in the base.

Unfortunately, extending and rearranging the backlight and video cables through the iMac's neck proved only problematic and I was never able to get it working. Whether the screen was flickering from cross talk due to the backlight high voltage lines or because of some unseen short in the 40+ new solder points in the video cable or twisted pairs getting separated, or any number of other issues, it just never worked.

Since I  started:

A few months ago, pinouts were made by fellow G4 modder JBerg of the native 17" iMac G4 LCD panel and an easy 1 to 1 correlation to a standard DVI plug. With this, there is no longer any need to completely gut and replace the display, use custom inverters, or ever take the screen off the base of the computer.  Having already invested so much time and money into my original plan, I was hoping to be able to stay the course and finish the job, but things don't always go the way you intend them to.

The Incident:
I was screwing around the other day, trying to get rid of the flickering image when I managed to short something out pretty bad and burn out my video driver. A nice puff of toxic smoke and the smell of burnt up silicone (and dreams) has pretty much convinced me it's time to go the DVI rout.

So this morning I ordered a new display assembly on eBay ($47, free shipping, not bad) so I'll be getting my DVI on as soon as that comes.

Quick Side Note: I've actually learned a lot from doing all this. I doing more mods with LCDs could be a lot of fun, so I'm glad I found this great eBay store that has everything you could ever want for LCD modding: http://stores.ebay.com/njytouch