Despite having earned a better reputation for picture quality on monitors than rivals NVidia in the past, ATI cards now seem to have the worst quality S-Video output. They work by scaling standard 800x600 or 640x480 resolutions to fit a PAL screen, which they do quite well; it's just a pity the overall quality is rather poor, with dull colours and some noise. You may find a genuine ATI or a good brand such as Hercules better than a cheap clone, and a short lead helps prevent any further degradation of the weak signal.
For Radeon 8500 and newer cards, ATI's proprietary drivers may be slightly easier to set up than GATOS, especially if you also want to play 3D games, but GATOS is the only option for older cards.To configure the proprietary driver, use the provided fglrxconfig utility and answer the questions appropriately. Appropriate resolutions are 800x600 (recommended) and 640x480.
GATOS is lagging behind XFree86 in its support for the latest chipsets:- at the time of writing it does not support 9200, 9600, 9800 or x800 series Radeons. However, I found that my 9200SE worked when I patched in the necessary chip ID etc from the driver source in the main XFree86 tree. However, I also had to comment out all references to R200_Qh through to R200Ql (note case) in the GATOS source because these chip IDs seemed to be missing.
GATOS is lagging behind XFree86 in its support for the latest chipsets:- at the time of writing it does not support 9200, 9600, 9800 or x800 series Radeons. However, I found that my 9200SE worked when I patched in the necessary chip ID etc from the driver source in the main XFree86 tree.
GATOS is a project to provide extra drivers for XFree86 to make use of the multimedia functionality of ATI cards. Getting it installed, especially for TV-out, looks a little daunting, but is simple enough given a recipe.
The first thing you will need is the source code for the version of XFree86 you are currently using, eg download and install the SRPM for RPM-based distributions, or use apt-get source in the case of Debian. You will need to at least partially build it to generate the Makefiles etc needed by GATOS.
TV-out is only available in one of GATOS' CVS branches, so make sure you also have CVS installed and run these commands:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gatos login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gatos co -r tv_output ati.2
Just press Return when the first command asks for a password. To build it when it's finished downloading run:
xmkmf /path/to/your/xfree86/tree
make
make install
where /path/to/your/xfree86/tree is the path to the
top-level directory of the XFree86 source (directory name
xc). make install must
be run as root.
To configure GATOS' TV-out in XF86Config or
XF86Config-4, use the ati driver in
the Device section as usual, but add this line:
Option "TVOutput" "PAL"
Other valid settings in place of PAL
are NTSC,
NTSC-J,
PAL-CN,
PAL-M,
PAL-N or
PAL-60.
Use a resolution of 800x600 (recommended) and/or 640x480 in the
Screen section.
X.org is the successor to XFree86 for some distributions. Some of the GATOS code has been folded in, but not the TV out support. Apparently the developers are considering adding support, but maybe based on BeOS code rather than GATOS. In the meantime, I don't know whether GATOS can be installed with X.org.