Specifications

Little Board/486i Technical Manual
3–36
3.14 FLAT PANEL/CRT VIDEO CONTROLLER
3.14.1 Developing a Custom BIOS for an Unsupported LCD Flat Panel
Ampro supplies flat panel BIOS images for several popular flat panels, accessible under SETUP. If you
select an unsupported panel, you must create a custom BIOS. A custom BIOS is created from an existing
BIOS using a customizing program. Ampro provides a BIOS modification kit containing the program and
complete documentation. Contact your Ampro sales representative or Ampro Technical Support for
information about the Little Board/486i Flat Panel BIOS Modification Kit.
Once you have modified a BIOS, you must load it into the video BIOS section of an onboard Flash
EPROM device (already on the Little Board/486i). Ampro provides a Flash programming utility to do
this.
To install a new video BIOS, follow this procedure:
1. Using SETUP, verify that the onboard video BIOS is shadowed (Page 1). It must be shadowed for
this procedure to work properly.
2. Remove EMM386, HIMEM, and other extended memory managers from your CONFIG.SYS or
AUTOEXEC.BAT files. No extended memory managers can be loaded. (You must reboot the system
for these changes to take effect.)
3. Remove the jumper on W9 to enable programming, and install it on W13 to connect +12V
programming power to the target Flash device. (You do not need to install a device—the new BIOS
will be stored in an unused portion of the ROM BIOS chip.
4. Enter the following command on the DOS command line:
PGMIBIOS VIDEO=filename
where filename is the name of the new video BIOS code file. (Frame the command so that DOS
accesses PGMIBIOS wherever it resides on your system.)
Leading and trailing spaces around the “=” are not allowed.
PGMIBIOS will display a message indicating when programming is complete. DO NOT REBOOT!
5. DO NOT remove power. Remove jumper W13 and restore jumper W9.
6. Reboot the system and test the result
3.14.2 External Video Overlay (PC Video)
The video controller supports up to 16 bits of external RGB video data to be input and merged with the
internal VGA data stream through the External Video Overlay port (J6). This interface allows you to
display “live” video on flat panel displays.
The controller supports two forms of video windowing:
1. Color key input
2. X-Y window keying
Color key input is the familiar video overlay technique in which a particular color is designated as a “key”
for switching between two video sources. The PC video interface provides for an externally-generated
color key signal input, which switches between the external video source and internally-generated video.
X-Y window key input can be used to position the live video window coordinates.