Laptops with MXM slots, want a video card with an MXM BIOS. Obviously, the usual V4 BIOS isn't MXM compatible. Also, the system BIOS would probably need to be edited to add the VSA ID to the whitelist. I don't want to mess with the system BIOS, or to attempt to make the VSA BIOS MXM compatible.

This means two things:

1. The laptop will not execute the BIOS on the video card. In the case of the VSA-100 it's not that bad. Many registers can be set with hardware straps, but not all. In this case, two important registers are not set to the value that is needed for such an application, vidInFormat[8] and vidInFormat[22] . Because of this, the digital RGB interface of the VSA will output scrambled Chrontel instead of unscrambled Brooktree format.

And this is how DVI looks with in such a setup (V5 5500 DVI):

On the V4 M4800 the usual TMDS encoder was replaced with an FPGA.

2. The laptop will behave as it doesn't have a video card plugged in. Because of this, if it's a laptop with an integrated GPU, it will not toggle the muxes to switch to the video signal coming from the MXM slot.

I intend to use the card in a Dell Precision M4800, which has the LVDS connector close to the MXM slot, so for keeping the solution as much as plug and play possible, I added an LVDS connector on the MXM card. Otherwise, some traces need to be cut on the motherboard. With this also goes backlight control via keyboard, but it may be possible to implement a workaround for this. More on that later.

Another important point is that a laptop screen has a fixed resolution. If the GPU is set to render at a resolution lower than the native resolution of the panel, the GPU will upscale that image so that the panel is always fed with it's native resolution. The VSA-100 will do no such scaling.

Also the panel wants to receive dual channel LVDS/OpenLDI/FPDLIK-I signal. Because of this, the card has a Realtek scaler, that takes the HDMI signal from the FPGA, upscales it if needed, and outputs LVDS to the panel. This is basically what's inside a PC monitor, added on the MXM card.