What's All This Brouhaha? » lcdtest

lcdtest now uses SCons instead of make

Eric — Thu, 24 May 2007 06:46:25 +0000

A few people reported problems caused by the “.d” dependency files created by the dependency analysis hack in the Makefile, so I’ve updated lcdtest to use SCons instead of make.Â I’ve also now made RPMs for Fedora Core 6 available (both i386 and x86_64), and submitted a review request to try to get them into the official Fedora package repository.

lcdtest 1.04

Eric — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:49:13 +0000

lcdtest wasn’t working properly with German keyboard layouts.Â It was using keysyms from SDL key events, and those only indicate what the unshifted key legend is.Â The fix was to enable the optional SDL key event Unicode mapping, and switch on that rather than the keysym.Â However, some keys such as escape and the cursor arrows do not map to Unicode codepoints, and SDL returns a Unicode null for those.Â I added code to check for them and map them into values in the Unicode Private Use Area.

lcdtest 1.04 should work with any keyboard layout that the host system supports, assuming that SDL’s Unicode mapping is done properly.

Help! There are too many dots!

Eric — Fri, 20 May 2005 08:14:46 +0000

lcdtest release 1.01 has a new “dots” test pattern, and an on-screen help message.

lcdtest is more popular than expected

Eric — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 09:00:21 +0000

Judging by the Freshmeat stats, lcdtest is way more popular than I ever would have guessed. There must have been some unsatisfied demand for a test pattern generator. Perhaps I’ll build Windows and MacOS X binaries for it as well. There already are some similar programs for those platforms, but perhaps there’s some utility in having a common cross-platform program, and anyhow, since I used SDL it should be easy.

lcdtest 1.00 has new options and commands

Eric — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 19:37:42 +0000

On a mailing list, someone pointed out a Windows lcd test program that was useful for adjusting the pixel clock frequency and phase of LCD monitors with analog VGA inputs (vs. DVI). It puts up alternating white and black vertical lines one pixel wide. This is useful either for auto-setup or for fine tuning.

lcdtest was able to do that, but you had to type the five key sequence “wv0–” to get it. So I’ve added the command “a” to do it with a single key.

I also added command line options to list the available video resolutions, select a resolution, and get help. There’s a new option to display in a window, intended for debugging and example screenshots.

I now consider the program to be feature complete, so the new release is version 1.00.

lcdtest – a new LCD test pattern utility

Eric — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 04:09:49 +0000

As mentioned in my last entry, I just replaced my aging Nokia 445Xi 21″ CRT monitor with a new Samsung SyncMaster 213T 21″ LCD monitor. Much easier on my aging eyes that can no longer focus close in, as the LCD face can sit much further back on my desk than the CRT face did.

I thought I’d try to count bad pixels. A Google search turned up various LCD test pattern programs for Windows and MacOS, but none for Linux. So naturally I thought I’d whip up a quick hack to fill this void.

lcdtest uses SDL for full-screen display, and in principle should work on other operating systems as well, but I’ve only tested it on an Athlon 64 running Fedora Core 3 Linux.