OK, things have got slightly complicated again. btw, I have insomnia lately, so this is a big post!...
I was going to post the stuff below when I realized that the latest ATI drivers might have been released. There have been many reports in the last weeks that ATI will add S3D support to their next Catalyst driver. I'm sure that a few sites even mentioned that it will specifically be the 10.1 version. So, I checked on ATI/AMD and sure enough, the drivers have been released. I just installed them and...... NOTHING!! I can't find ANY new controls at all for S3D (not even anaglyph).
I know that they only said the drivers would be "more compatible" with IZ3D and the Bit Cauldron shutter glasses, and also they apparently added support for decoding the coming 3D Blu-Ray titles (using an updated PowerDVD?), but many people got the impression that they would include other S3D options in the drivers too (just like nVidia do)?? So unless there is a registry hack to enable some new S3D options, it's VERY disappointing as usual. I was hoping they might still have added some other ways of generating a stable L/R signal with the new drivers which could be taken advantage of with homebrew controllers (I'm pretty sure it's only nVidia who control the SDA pin to make connecting glasses easier.) Oh well, hopefully someone will hack the Zigbee stuff soon.
Do ATI/AMD not realize that there has always been massive interest in stereo 3D and I'm sure they lost a LARGE amount of market share in the past for not including S3D in the modern drivers! I only changed to ATI about two years ago because they apparently had better support for HD decoding at the time, and the drivers may be a bit more stable too. It was a real shame to loose the direct shutter control with nVidia. Then again, my glasses only worked well with "bench-breaking" CRT monitors, and I'm NOT going there again!
With IZ3D though, all we're really asking for is a simple way of getting a stable L/R sync signal out of the PC. Why is this so difficult?? I know it's not IZ3D's fault, but is it not possible to make a basic USB dongle for this and control it from the IZ3D API??
Anywho, rant over. I'll have to take a deeper look into these Catalyst drivers now. @THEDRUMMER: About your glasses...
Ahh, I see - it looks like the Asus glasses are wired directly to the jack plug, and they don't have an integrated panel driver. I just found a site which shows a basic circuit for connecting the Asus glasses to an SGI Workstation... The SGI uses the same Left / Right, +5V/0V, 50/50 signal that you find on a VESA connector, BUT - I didn't realize you have nVidia cards!!...
So all you will need is the opamp circuit from the site below, and connect the input of the circuit to the SDA pin on one of your nVidia cards. The nVidia drivers already support stereo 3D on almost all modern cards, and the drivers should output the L/R signal on the SDA pin (of one, or both of your VGA sockets, I'm not sure?). Here is the SGI site with the opamp circuit...
http://www.roosmcd.dds.nl/oldsite/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Asus TNT2 card must have had a similar LCD panel driver on board, and this is most likely why they used the jack plug instead of a 3-pin plug? (The main difference is that the panels need a higher voltage to blank sufficiently, hence the extra circuit.)
I don't think you'll need the E-Dimensional dongle... I don't know a huge amount about them, but if it is just a simple pass-through for the SDA signal, then you will still need to find a 3-pin plug to connect to the opamp circuit. However, I think the E-Dim dongle needs to be activated with on-screen colour codes to set it to specific modes (sync doubling etc, which you probably don't need anyway). What I would do is buy a short VGA extension cable, carefully remove a small section of the insulation, find the wire which connects the SDA pin, then splice a wire into the SDA wire, and hook up to the opamp circuit.
OR, super-simple method - buy a pair of glasses which already have a splitter cable + shutter drive, and work with nVidia cards! The Elsa's are very cheap on eBay UK, no doubt they appear often in the US too? They are a cheap way of getting started if you just want to try S3D out.
You might have to do a bit of Web searching to see if the nVidia stereo mode works in SLI (or even if it outputs a sync signal from your cards) because I'm not 100% sure. You might only be able to use one card at a time in stereo mode - does anybody else know??
The simple opamp circuit won't have the variable delay of course, but it might work well anyway and is a much easier solution than the blue-line stuff. Things like blue-line decoding was only necessary for ATI cards, because ATI were short-sighted enough to not include S3D support as standard.
Same here about the projector situation - I've owned about six different projectors over the years and have upgraded each time I can afford to. I couldn't possibly afford one of the 120Hz projectors yet until the prices come down a lot. I've always loved the idea of S3D, so it's frustrating that there are so many "60Hz only" projectors / DLP TV's out there which are way too flickery for shutter glasses imho. (I've still yet to try ColourFlip mode on a 2x speed projector because it turns out my old projector's PSU has failed again.) If I can remember, I'll give it a try on my sister's X1 soon.
I actually have an extra chip on my controller for driving glasses like yours directly. It's more complex to drive it though, as I wanted it to work like the Elsa controller where the voltage on each panel also swaps polarity every other time a shutter is blanked. (to stop the LCD panels apparently degrading over time if the drive voltage is always the same polarity.)
You will probably get away with using the opamp circuit, but I would just make sure that niether of the shutters stays blank for too long (eg. if the S3D game / movie has been closed, or the opamp is still powered when the L/R input signal is removed.)
This is why I added the extra chip to my controller, so it could drive almost ANY generic glasses directly. If I could get the damn blue-line decoding working it would be great, but it's not playing ball. I could just order some PCB's for the current design, then add blue-line decoding at a later date (the controller works fine when running from VSYNC with an L/R swap switch, but it's a tad annoying getting the swap correct).
Would anyone still buy a controller which does the following?...
- Basic shutter control via the VGA VSYNC signal (will need to toggle the L/R swap switch occasionally when starting S3D games / movies).
- Probable future support for blue-line decoding (once working properly, and if ATI/AMD don't come up with a simple solution for sync output).
- No direct HDMI support, as too complex and expensive to implement atm. (although, workaround for HDMI support is possible if HDMI / VGA ports stay in sync).
- Support for the ColourFlip mode. (Only really needed for fixed 60Hz DLP projectors / TV's, more testing to do,
looks like the shutters will be TOO fast with 4x DLP projectors, and still requires method for configuring for different DLP projectors / TV's.)
- Manual variable phase delay (to minimize ghosting with different DLP displays and possibly plasma TV's).
- Will still work for refresh rates above 60Hz (maximum refresh dependant on type of shutter glasses).
- Integrated shutter driver for controlling "dumb" shutter panels directly.
- VESA 3-pin output (to control any standard glasses with their own integrated shutter driver, or to control an IR emitter).
- VESA 3-pin INPUT (for adding the variable delay to existing VESA outputs on 3D DLP TV's. Could still use ColourFlip on older 60Hz DLP TV's).
- USB / mains powered.
- Upgradable firmware for new modes and features.
- Cost roughly GBP £30 / US $45 ?
Any takers, or suggestions (apart from: "Man, you type WAY too much!"
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
)
OzOnE.