Screen Rotation on a B&W G3

According to the manual, you would have to install the Driver, using this procedure:

Driver Installation

Use the monitor CD to install the appropriate monitor driver for your operating system.

Windows XP · Windows Millennium · Windows 2000 · Windows 98

It does not look to me like Dell has provided a Macintosh driver.

I don't have Tiger, but a quick search on Google brought up this: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050505095132556.


This should allow you to put the screen in portrait mode, though it sounds like you'll have to manually flick between modes.

Hope this helps.

Jason

From what I understand the monitor has nothing to do with the rotation of the screen. For example my NEC Laptop running Windows XP can rotate the screen, as it can on my external 19" TFT Targa Visionary monitor. There is nothing special about either screen, or the drivers used (Plug & Play). The screen rotation is handled by the Intel graphics driver. The fact that you can easily physically rotate your screen is irrelevant to the way the graphics card draws to it.

Now I think about it, Tiger supports screen rotation on some graphics cards. What does my NEC Laptop and some Macs have in common? An integrated Intel 9xx GMA graphics card.

As Apple did not mention any specific monitor requirements on the page I already cited I would surmise from this that it is your graphics card that does not support the screen rotation and rather than being computationally expensive the rotation is handled by the graphics card (by simply changing the order it reads from it memory for conversion in the DAC).

So to concur with your assumptions: 1. Your graphics card seems not to support screen rotation.

I am unaware of a 3rd party PCI card based on the Intel 9xx GMA, nor do I know of a Mac compatible PCI ATI card which would allow you to rotate the screen in Tiger.

Not that it helps with your particular setup but I would put money on your Dell monitor working perfectly with a shiny new Mac mini.

Hope that helps.

Jason.

After reviewing both the ATI (AMD) and Apple Driver websites I can find no specific driver for your card. All drivers for OS X are for Radeon or above. You can always try installing the aforementioned Radeon driver, but if the operating system even tries to use it you may end up with other issues.

As I mentioned before I believe screen rotation is a function of the graphics card and is supported directly by the operating system (and included drivers), not a 3rd party driver. Speculation maybe, but I come to this conclusion only by reading this article on the Apple website.

If you feel that ATI are not really answering you, I suggest flat out asking them "Does this card natively support display rotation?". This way you have a platform independent answer, which allows you to decide if a simple software solution would work. I would think Apple would simply cite the above article if asked the same question ("If you can do it, you can see it.").

Hope this helps settle your mind on the issue as short of buying hardware known to support the feature, I feel you are out of luck.

Jason.

The "ATI Displays" utility has rotation settings. They are under "advanced".
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13327

Dave,

I was under the impression the "ATI Displays" utility was for Radeon or above only, it was the driver I was referring to on the ATI/AMD website. Will they correctly support his card?

Jason.

It looks like you're right.
ATI Displays used to support non-Radeon cards though.
I will look for an older version compatible with Rage cards.

No luck. Sorry.