ryans With regards to PWM, get a high quality oscilloscope and photodiode. Both can be purchased for <$1000. Have a look at @TechSensitive's posts.

With regards to dithering. I want to try a lossless PCIe capture card to check several display outputs in slow motion. Can be purchased for ~$400 at most on eBay.

There's a company in Vancouver that makes a high speed camera that does up to 21,000 fps. It costs $3000 but I know someone who works there and I might be able to test one at their offices.

http://www.krontech.ca/

      JTL Lmk and I'd be happy to help out with funds for anything.

      • JTL replied to this.

          ryans Thanks.

          I just want to writeup a plan and "parts list" for full transparency. If that makes sense.

            15 days later

            @ryans I see your deleted post (since I am a moderator). View my user profile and write me an email and I'll give you a summery of my reverse engineering since not all of it is 100% confirmed yet so I'm not ready to publicly write about it.

            5 months later

            Does anyone know wow much it would be (roughly) to get everything needed to use"Amulet Hotkey for KVM over IP"? Has anyone actually tried it to disable themporal dithering?

            diop I have slight suspiciousness on how their Windows solution could work. I just assumed that they 9xx and 10xx is a lost cause since even under Linux with a 1070 with the nvidia-settings dithering control it still looks "noisy".

            And to be fair they didn't mention any GPU model numbers.

            • diop replied to this.

                JTL Perhaps the fix works on all driver versions - the guide was produced within the last 6 months so presumably they are using W10+10xx GPU's.

                AHK have quite a lot of re-sellers - I tried contacting Jigsaw24 (UK) but didn't get a response. This is mentioned in one of their blogs.

                "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."

                It's a long shot but maybe it's worth contacting all AHK re-sellers to see if someone will be sympathetic and provide us with a copy.

                We then just need to find a guru to bypass the hardware check and we could have a working solution.

                • JTL replied to this.

                    diop We then just need to find a guru to bypass the hardware check and we could have a working solution.

                    a.k.a me.

                    Email me btw 🙂

                      Also worth noting, it's possible connecting your Macbook or Mac computer to an external graphics card (which then connects to an external monitor). The external graphics card might not use temporal dithering at all.

                      • JTL replied to this.

                        ryans I can see why you'd think that at first but based on my understanding of how external graphic cards work the drivers are almost the same if not exactly the same .kext as their mobile counterparts, so I highly doubt this is going to solve the issue. People who've owned the Mac Pro which uses a desktop graphics card have still had issues with temporal dithering.

                          a month later

                          @JTL How does your "no dithering on OSX" project go? Would you care to share any knowledge about this? Maybe in the Wiki?

                          Seems Amulet Hotkey also changes one settings in the IO registry (different approaches for Nvidia and AMD). Did you ask them to kindly share their findings so that people like us may be able to use Apple products again?

                          Or maybe we should "spam" Apple support with a request to make dithering optional.

                          Would be great to have some progress here as I cannot use my MBPs for a long time anymore and I am looking for ways to solve this...

                            deepflame How does your "no dithering on OSX" project go? Would you care to share any knowledge about this? Maybe in the Wiki?

                            I took a break because of university and other things.

                            I think I know what needs to be done and how to "rebase" it to be 10.13-10.14 compatible.

                            deepflame Seems Amulet Hotkey also changes one settings in the IO registry (different approaches for Nvidia and AMD). Did you ask them to kindly share their findings so that people like us may be able to use Apple products again?

                            @ryans wrote to the original developer of the first version of the KEXT, but I suspect their approach is different from mine and I highly suspect mine will work better.

                            I've gotten it to a stage where I see on my second Macbook Pro, it makes the dithering "worse" like a broken "flickering" monitor, now to make it better.

                            deepflame Or maybe we should "spam" Apple support with a request to make dithering optional.

                            Good luck with that

                            deepflame Would be great to have some progress here as I cannot use my MBPs for a long time anymore and I am looking for ways to solve this...

                            I wish I could have better news for you.

                                    @JTL highly appreciate your explanation here. Would you be open to share your work on Github for others to have a look and contribute via pull requests? Maybe this can be a joint effort.

                                    @ryans what were your findings from contacting the developer at Amulet Hotkey? Did they seem open to sharing their knowledge?

                                    • JTL replied to this.

                                      deepflame @JTL highly appreciate your explanation here. Would you be open to share your work on Github for others to have a look and contribute via pull requests? Maybe this can be a joint effort.

                                      I wish other people could help but none of this stuff is trivial. I don't mean to sound rude butt talk to me when you have two OS X machines (one as debugging host and the other as "target" where you try and disable dithering on it), a firm grasp of C/C++, X64 Assembly and IDA Pro. Then we can work on this 😃

                                          JTL two OSX machines (check), firm grasp of C/C++ (kinda check), and then you lost me. Guess I can teach myself assembly and the disassembler but would think that it would not get the highest priority in my life currently. Great that we have someone like you who is into stuff like this... wished it was just setting parameters in the IO registry to turn dithering off 🙂

                                            a year later

                                            Just as an FYI, I recently tried upgrading my ALL GOOD MacBook Pro (early 2013) running Mojave, to Catalina.

                                            And... eye strain. It was that nasty low level type that really sneaks up on you.

                                            Anyway, I downgraded - thank heavens I made several backups before the upgrade, and everything is back to normal. Phew.

                                            Still, that means there's simply no new Apple gear or software that I know to be safe... and I'm now stuck on old versions of MacOS.

                                            I don't think it's so easy. I mean for me the macbook air 2017 with Mojave was bad as the new macbook pro 16 with Catalina.
                                            So I think it's a combination of display, OS and GPU drivers. Really hard to understand!
                                            At least I understood that is not just a display problem like I thought. For exempla, my desktop PC is unusable for me with the latest version of W10 1909 !

                                              Lauda89 I completely understand. In my case this early 2013 MacBook Pro is the ONLY MacBook Pro I know I can use without issues. So far for me with the MacBooks it's been purely hardware related (Windows is another matter). But with Catalina... even my good hardware is no longer "good".

                                                2 months later

                                                Is there any progress in developing software or contacting amulet hotkey partners?

                                                • annv replied to this.
                                                  dev