Very excited by this prospect JTL - it could make a big difference to a lot of people's lives if you could work it out. I no longer use Macbooks I'm afraid, had to chop them out my life!

  • JTL replied to this.

    si_edgey Unfortunate.

    Not making any promises but now that my vision is stabilizing and I have more time, why not do it?

    6 days later

    I think the best goal would be for me to develop a new NVinject of sorts that does IORegistry injection, but works with newer OS X versions and 64-bit, etc.

    If you disable SIP it let's the kext be fully used without signing (which costs $100 a year) so this is good for testing. If we have a full version that works and we know it I can just pony up the $100 to make an easy-to-use signed version.

    Also I was looking through the AMD kexts and saw something interesting.

    jtl-macbookpro:Apple kexts jtl$ strings AMDSupport |grep AAPL
    AAPL,slot-name
    AAPL%02X,
    AAPL,gray-value
    AAPL00,T1
    AAPL00,T2
    AAPL00,T3
    AAPL00,T4
    AAPL00,T5
    AAPL00,T6
    AAPL00,T7
    AAPL00,LinkFormat
    AAPL00,PixelFormat
    AAPL00,Dither
    [sic]

    Now if we check the NVinject's Info.plist

    			<key>entriesToAdd</key>
    			<dict>
    				<key>AAPL01,Dither</key>
    				<data>
    				AAAAAQ==
    				</data>
    			</dict>

    So there is a difference.

    @vinkenvvt I remember you did something with Clover EFI and it didn't work, which one was that?

    6 days later

    Good work JTL, sounds like progress of some kind. Any joy with the AAPL00 / AAPL01 thing?

    • JTL replied to this.

      si_edgey Haven't gotten the injector working yet. I think previous attempts failed because the AAPL entry was injected to the wrong object. And there's no guarantee that this works for Intel graphics either.

      24 days later

      Looks like I got the KEXT injector working on El Capitan 😃

      Can't speak for the dithering part though.

      Should work:
      - AMD
      - NVIDIA

      Probably won't work without patching
      - Any Intel Graphics chip

      https://i.imgur.com/xErxWFt.png

        JTL Will Intel be a possibility in the future? Or could the ditherig tool be ported over to OS X?

        • JTL replied to this.

          diop

          diop Or could the ditherig tool be ported over to OS X?

          It would be hard. I could also see a Linux port in the future. (easier)

          JTL Does it mean you managed to turn off the eyestrain issue with the KEXT? Or that is still a long way to go?

          • JTL replied to this.

            martin The dithering itself hasn't been fixed.

            All that's been done is I managed to sort out the KEXT injection itself. Still some way to go.

            If I get a second computer setup (doesn't necessarily have to be a Mac I can do live debugging which should let me check if the dithering is being turned off by the driver, etc.)

            20 days later

            If anyone has an OS X machine with an Nvidia GPU and possibly has dithering "sensntivity" I might have a working Nvidia injector working for you on short notice. No promises though.

            • Gurm replied to this.

              JTL We'd need to be able to lock the nVidia GPU "on", right? So not sure this would work on my 2013 MBP with nVidia+Intel?

              • JTL replied to this.

                Gurm Well. I don't think that's going to be an issue.

                Unlike nVidia Optimus the switchable graphics on Macbooks are fundamentally different. According to an Apple display engineer I spoke with a number of years ago the switchable graphics works via a "mux chip" that's hooked up to the display and the output of the nVidia and Intel cards. It has a driver on OS X that "signals it" to switch cards when needed and it completely disconnects the screen from the Intel card and "connects it" to the nVidia card. And before you say "Well the screen doesn't turn off when switching cards". That's probably because it switches so fast it just drops a frame or two. This is 100% confirmed under Linux with raw I/O access.

                Nice. What I meant was more along the lines of ... there used to be an app that let us tell the machine to ONLY use nVidia, that doesn't work under newer versions of OSX. So we'll have to figure out a way to not have it switch back to Intel.

                • JTL replied to this.

                  All I'm willing to say at this time publicly is that some major technical hurdles have been overcome, with regards to the framework needed for injecting the code for disabling the dithering in the AMD/Nvidia kexts under OS X, but it's not done yet.

                  diop Will Intel be a possibility in the future? Or could the ditherig tool be ported over to OS X?

                  If someone makes a Linux version of the dithering tool, it might be possible for it to work under OS X. Again, not making any promises here.

                  5 months later

                  Looks like a UK Apple Service Provider either re-sell or are involved with AHK as I discovered this post.

                  Link: https://www.jigsaw24.com/news/amulet-hotkey-fix-temporal-dithering-for-latest-macos

                  "If you're using Amulet Hotkey for KVM over IP, be warned that installing the latest version of macOS on your endpoints automatically re-enables temporal dithering.

                  This vastly increases the amount of information you're forced to handle over IP and, as a result, will have a negative impact on the quality of your image.

                  Happily, Amulet Hotkey are already aware of the issue, and have released a kernel extension that allows you to disable temporal dithering at the driver level, regardless of which version of macOS you're running. (If you're running an earlier version of macOS or OS X, the fix should already be in place – contact us if you find this isn't the case.)

                  The usual caveats apply: the fix will only work with Amulet hardware and software, not with that from third parties; the kext itself is not available publicly – in a delightfully cloak-and-dagger scenario, you need to get in touch with our team on the details below, and they'll send you a temporary download link and instructions for how to install it."

                    diop "The fix will only work with with Amulet hardware and software" 🙁

                    • JTL replied to this.
                      dev