MSI Media Live - VFD (1 Viewer)

[cool3r]

Hello,

is there any way to make a VFD display on MSI Media Live work with MediaPortal on Windows XP PRO? I tried many things, still no success.

Many thanks for any help.

 

[JoeDalton]

I'm currently working on a driver for the MSI Media Live. Unfortunately there is no documentation available for it.
Nevertheless I'm already able to send some text to it.

Still too soon to integrate it in MP, though... Stay tuned...

 

[stevie77]

Hi Joe!
I recently found out that the MSI barebone's vfd (DM-140GINK Demo) is the same as built in the ScaleoEV-series. So I hacked the already available SCALEO EV driver and GOT IT TO WORK!!

I'm already testing this since a few days.
I've also got some sourcecode and documentation around ...

PS: Exactly the same vfd board is also built into hiper's HMC-2K53A barebone.
PPS: Textmode works perfect, but there's no code for graphics support in their ATM.

If you give your email-adress I'will send you all I've got and done so far ....

 

[JoeDalton]

In the popup menu you get when you click on my nick there are 2 options"Send email to..." and "Send private message to ..."

I don't want to put my email in public forums to avoid spam. Those email addres harvesting bots are getting too damn smart these days

Joe

 

[stevie77]

Hi Joe,

I tried to send you an email the way you described ... haven't got any answer 'till now?!

 

[cool3r]

Thank you both for your effort. I'll be glad for any plugin/patch when you make it work.

 

[JoeDalton]

Thanks stevie77

The driver is in SVN now, so it should be available in the next public SVN build.
Stevie77's driver is called DM140GINK and supports MSI Media Live & Hiper HMC-2K53A Barebones.

Number of characters should be set to 18, number of lines to 2.

You should uninstall (or kill) the VFD driver that came with your case before starting MP with this driver, otherwise they will both send data to the display at the same time...

I don't know about the Hiper HMC-2K53A, but for the MSI Media Live the driver process is called VFD_Control.exe.
So it should be possible to create a little command line script that kills the driver, starts MP and waits. After MP closes it starts the driver again. It should probably be something like this:

startmediaportal.cmd:

@echo off
tskill vfd_control
start /wait "c:\program files\team mediaportal\mediaportal\mediaportal.exe"
vfd_control

Waiting on your feedback...

Joe

 

[stevie77]

I totally unistalled the original driver as it's not needed by mediaportal. So no conflicts with vfd_controller occur.

 

[cool3r]

Thank you, again. I'll give a shot as soon as I'll have some time - a lot of work lately :-(, and will let you know how it works for me.

 

[cool3r]

Finally got time to test it and I have to say: works great! Thank you again