PhilsComputerLab wrote:

That's funny, we used the same exact card to get the bracket from 😁

Regarding capturing, you might have to seriously upgrade your machine. Capturing at 1600 x 1200 60 fps my Haswell Pentium Anniversary CPU just handles it at around 70% CPU load.

I think a FX6300 would work well.

Well when you need a bracket you look for something useless to act as donor, a DVI addon card for Intel chipsets with built in video is pretty useless! 😁

I'm going to try an old Scoket-775 Asus P5K motherboard with a Q9550, if that does not work I will upgrade to a Socket 1366 motherboard with a low power 6 core Xeon.

I think I mostly will capture at 1280*1024 and lower resolutions.

Yea lower resolutions are easier to handle and a Core 2 Quad should do just fine.

@Skyscraper; If you've got a decent RAID you might be able to hit higher resolutions with compression disabled, assuming this is an option.

For me, it is the only option (And I'd try to do it anyway for quality), which is why I've dragged 1920x1080 60 out of a measly Pentium D, the only real limit is the hard drives (About 280MB/s) and I could make them go faster if I expanded the array to more disks. I rarely need to, however, because I'm a DOS guy and thus spend very little of my time above 640x480 - a size my capture card doesn't support, so I normally scale to 720x576. It doesn't matter as there's literally no point in up-scaling standard VGA to some higher resolution only for it to need further processing when it goes through Vegas. I think that if I got a new scaler box and wiring, I'd probably be able to achieve a near pixel perfect capture at resolutions the capture board supports. Unfortunately, the requirements for external hardware are ridiculous, the problem with being an early adopter is that you are doomed to make the mistakes and be stuck with the limitations everyone else learns from... It is interesting to see how many PCI-E capture cards capable of such resolutions are around now, I get the impression that it will be much easier to do when I get the new workstation going. When I set the current system up it was an obscure and not very well understood science and almost none of the hardware you could get worked properly.

HighTreason wrote:

@Skyscraper; If you've got a decent RAID you might be able to hit higher resolutions with compression disabled, assuming this is an option.

For me, it is the only option (And I'd try to do it anyway for quality), which is why I've dragged 1920x1080 60 out of a measly Pentium D, the only real limit is the hard drives (About 280MB/s) and I could make them go faster if I expanded the array to more disks. I rarely need to, however, because I'm a DOS guy and thus spend very little of my time above 640x480 - a size my capture card doesn't support, so I normally scale to 720x576. It doesn't matter as there's literally no point in up-scaling standard VGA to some higher resolution only for it to need further processing when it goes through Vegas. I think that if I got a new scaler box and wiring, I'd probably be able to achieve a near pixel perfect capture at resolutions the capture board supports. Unfortunately, the requirements for external hardware are ridiculous, the problem with being an early adopter is that you are doomed to make the mistakes and be stuck with the limitations everyone else learns from... It is interesting to see how many PCI-E capture cards capable of such resolutions are around now, I get the impression that it will be much easier to do when I get the new workstation going. When I set the current system up it was an obscure and not very well understood science and almost none of the hardware you could get worked properly.

I think I will use a single disk so what ever codec the CPU can handle is what I will end up using. I think I also mostly will capture DOS stuff and early Windows 9x games.

Today I rescued my old 2TB Western Digital drive that had a stuck* spindle motor. The motor for some reason got stuck* when I was torrenting with... ehm... "too many" active connections a year ago. The solution was as is often the case violence! I'm now backing up the drive but it seems to work like new so perhaps I can use it as a capture disk. Its a win in any case as I saved alot of pictures and loads of retro related stuff I diddn't have any backups of.

*The disk at least would not spin for some reason and having it connected to a system made the system hang after posting.

Funny, because just a couple of days ago I saved a 2GB drive by getting violent with it. In short, it wouldn't work but had nothing important on it anyway - in fact, it is getting replaced soon and always was temporary - so I figured it was worth a shot. The repair involved me grabbing the nearest firm object that would fit in the machine, which happened to be a large black pry bar, powering the machine and bashing the drive repeatedly. Surprisingly, I heard a "Veeeeeeeeeeeeee-ccchhhhhhkkkkkk" after a moment and after resetting the system, DOS came right up. It does intermittently stop working however, so the replacement is definitely still on the cards. I won't be upset if it dies, it's given me about 15 years of service and is even older than that, plus I already said knew it was dodgy and meant to replace it anyway.

I'm a little negligent with my 2TB capture disks, they run a bit hot and they're older than the other drives in that system. They're WD RE4's though and are running within spec, so they should be fine for quite a while. One tip I can offer you if you're going to use a disk for captures only; Make sure Windows or yourself never defrags the drive. Capture software likes to write sector-by-sector to avoid seek time and de-fragmented drives, rather ironically, do NOT store data in this logical order thanks to the evil that is NTFS.

HighTreason wrote:

Funny, because just a couple of days ago I saved a 2GB drive by getting violent with it. In short, it wouldn't work but had nothing important on it anyway - in fact, it is getting replaced soon and always was temporary - so I figured it was worth a shot. The repair involved me grabbing the nearest firm object that would fit in the machine, which happened to be a large black pry bar, powering the machine and bashing the drive repeatedly. Surprisingly, I heard a "Veeeeeeeeeeeeee-ccchhhhhhkkkkkk" after a moment and after resetting the system, DOS came right up. It does intermittently stop working however, so the replacement is definitely still on the cards. I won't be upset if it dies, it's given me about 15 years of service and is even older than that, plus I already said knew it was dodgy and meant to replace it anyway.

I'm a little negligent with my 2TB capture disks, they run a bit hot and they're older than the other drives in that system. They're WD RE4's though and are running within spec, so they should be fine for quite a while. One tip I can offer you if you're going to use a disk for captures only; Make sure Windows or yourself never defrags the drive. Capture software likes to write sector-by-sector to avoid seek time and de-fragmented drives, rather ironically, do NOT store data in this logical order thanks to the evil that is NTFS.

It was probably heat that was the reason the disk failed but the reasons for the heat was the torrenting abuse with too many connections in combination with the drive only having 5% free space. I do neglect my storage in my modern systems while I care more about the retro stuff.

This is my current storage setup in my main rig. Did I mention that I quit smoking again a month ago? The image is small to avoid people getting sick... Half a year ago an ashtray fell off my desk just by the systems intake fans. I'm going to rebuild the system so I can't be arsed to clean it before then, I have been putting off the rebuilding for ages though. The system is down under stuff, the rest of the floor in my apartment (while not exactly clean) is not this dirty.

Heh, you don't want to know what the insides of mine looks like...

The inside of the case panel are a bad sign to start with. Almost burned on by now, clean the dust and you'll still see the marks where it was;

The internal organs look decent from a distance. The cable management is actually good because the cables all sit against the panel instead of against the board, leaving a large path for airflow;

The dusty vents and the low water level show signs of age though

The lowest 80mm intake fan with dirt around it. Personally I think it's doing OK to say it has only had minimal cleaning in the last few (over 5) years;

Black duct tape covers wires and other dirty repairs to keep the motherboard alive;

I'd have snapped one of the back of the radiators, but I can't get to the inlet with the camera. The back of the reservoir is pretty bad too because there's water everywhere and all the metal is going blue/green a bit like traces do when exposed to battery acid. I have no more fluid, cannot get parts to fix the system and am pretty much stuck having to hope it holds out until the Xeon box is up and running later in the year.

I can post this machine in here and still be on topic because Pentium 4 era stuff seems to be allowed and the machine uses a Pentium D 950. Pretty good though, because without all the capture gear and various crap leeching the performance the CPU can encroach the 2000 point marker in Passmark 7... Nonetheless, it's an oldie now and it is very, very tired.

Boring office activities. But I could not resist preparing memory upgrade for Gravis Ultrasound. The postman just brought me this beautiful Trident card. It's such a pity it's loosing its brain 😀

Started a new hobby this week: LaserDisc. I already bought a player and 200+ LDs.

Watched a Steven Seagal movie yesterday but fell asleep. 😀

I have been editing video all day. The workstation is a moody old thing, it works but it does complain now when it has to work hard and the liquid cooling is approaching a point where it simply doesn't work.

I will have to render at night when the ambient temperature is lower, though I will inspect the system first to see if there is anything I can do. It may just be that the radiators are clogged as I have been moving a lot of stuff around and that tends to bring the dust up, dust which will clog the radiators easily with the system shifting a few hundred cubic feet of air every minute.

Purchased one SoundBlaster AWE64 (Value) CT4500 for my Socket 7 build.
It seems to be in a pretty good shape.
The cost was about US$15.00



BTW this is the pictures from the seller, i'm waiting the card to be delivered.

Need to put it in the "Bought this retro hardware" instead. (Can happen for everyone though)
A good and decent card never the less. Nice and decent price too. 7 to 15 for an AWE64 is ok.

Today i have packaged alot of motherboards in ESD bags and put them in huge boxes.

I have also played around with my new Epiphan DVI2PCIe frame grabber and it's just great. 😀

The Epiphan capture tool works good but I can see some room for improvements, like why do you need to type a new file name for every new resolution you capture. I'm not that quick how about calling the files filename_vgamode04_filenumber.avi, filename_vgamode16_filenumber.avi, filename_vgamode08_filenumber.avi and so on. Some things I want to capture do not have a pause button to use at resolution change. I'm sure I will figure out some way around this like using another capture utility that can switch to a new file and continue capturing at resolution change automagicly and alot faster than I do manually.

Quality wise I'm pretty convinced that the Epiphan DVI2PCIe is as good as it can get.

PeterLI wrote:

Watched a Steven Seagal movie yesterday but fell asleep. 😀

That's normal.

luckybob wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

Watched a Steven Seagal movie yesterday but fell asleep. 😀

That's normal.

Perhaps this can keep PeterLI awake, it will be an upgrade over Steven Seagals tired "jokes" in any case.

Thunderstruck by Steve'n'Seagulls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4Ao-iNPPUc

Funny story, I was at job and needed to stop and buy a power supply and think it would be nice to grab two silent fan to replace them on the optiplex gxpro as yesterday I fixed some wiring on the sbawe32 to have it sound more clear and I noticed how noisy the old fans where. So I look at the manual online but no info so I searched google for "gxpro optiplex fan" and found all my answer here, thanks to Mike 01Hawk : Thoughts on quieting my noisy "OldSchool GXPro" Rig? and My Dell GXPro Pentium Pro 200MHz (which I'm about to get rid of). *PICS*. Got all the info I need... The more I know about vogons, the more I like it, just finished installing the case fan and took a break before switching the psu one to write this comment! 😎

My Core2 Q9550 + Asus PK5 capture system runs Windows 7 64bit. I had some issues with the onboard Realtek ALC 883 sound chip that is infesting the motherboard so I tried installing an old Sound Blaster Live! as I only need a line in that actually works but Windows 7 just laughed at me. I then tried an Audigy 2 Platinum with the same result Im now trying a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic SBO460 and finally something that actually works in Windows 7!

I have not bought a sound card the last 15 years or so, its lucky I have found some of these Sound Blaster Xi-Fi cards in dumpsters the last few years as they are the oldest cards Creative could be bothered with supporting.

I do believe I had an Audigy 2 ZS running under Windows 10. I used these drivers: http://danielkawakami.blogspot.com.au/

But if you've got a X-Fi, then just use that 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I do believe I had an Audigy 2 ZS running under Windows 10. I used these drivers: http://danielkawakami.blogspot.com.au/

But if you've got a X-Fi, then just use that 😀

I guess he is the same guy that did the kX driver pack for XP?

Good that someone does what Creative should have done.

I have spent the last two hours looking for my Geforce 6800GT PCI-E card. I last used it 11 months and two hardware reorganizations ago now it's unsurpisely nowhere to be found.

If I had been payed decent wages for all the time I have spent looking for different items I would have been a rich man, I really need to fix this with yet another reorganization...