WolverineDK wrote:

. So I will guess, he does not need it.

woosh

Perhaps "useful" wasn't the right word, elianda! 😀

I just meant if they could be used as novelty, if they're worth spending time mucking around with, but by the sounds of it, not really. Microsoft Video One files always look pretty crappy.

Well if you think 320x240@15fps video is cool..... the killer application for these cards back in the day was CU-SeeMe video conferencing and to add pizazz to your Macromedia Action! or Director presentations.

As for my Creative Labs Collection

-2xCT1320C (one has factory CMS kit)
-A random SB16 that I dont recall the model # of, its a later model
-a CT2760 AWE32 thats in the 486
-A boxed SB16 "WavEffects", one of Creative's last ISA products
-A boxed AWE64 Gold that I paid $220 for new
-An original SB Live! card. Folks here call it the "gold" version, but thats not its official model designation
-Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 speakers back when they had Creative branding. Yeah, thats pushing it but Creative owns the company!
-Creative PC-DVD Dxr3 kit.
-An X-Fi Fata1ity PCI card

I also have random SB Live! value cards laying around, and the infamous Dell OEM Live! from a Dimension 8100 in a P4 system I built.

I demand somebody make a full-on maximum-fruity multimedia presentation of retro gaming using HSC Interactive and 320x240 video. Copious amount of that multimedia stuff.

BTW the infamous Dell fake SBLive works in Win7 32bit with the XP drivers. I put a Radeon 9600 and 1gb RAM into my parents' old Dell 4550 and installed 7 onto it with great success.

I could do it with Macromedia Action! (way better than Powerpoint for interactivity), I just need a capture card. There were a few TrueVision EISA capture cards out there that worked with Windows 3.1x and NT 3.x that could do full motion video, but they are tough to find nowadays. My 486 already has the full version of Video For Windows 1.1 installed and ready to go.

BTW, that Dell OEM Live! I have got the real Emu10k1 chip, but adds the yellow digital out jack. I remember dealing with those fake Emu10k1x cards when servicing machines back in the day. Drivers were a pain to find and get working until Creative caved and posted them on their site.

oh yeah.... I forgot I do have a few various SB lives.. the original ones that first got released, but it's the value version, no IO port board
one of them is a dell OEM one I think?

swaaye: you know anything about HSC? I had no idea how to even make something simple with it 🤣

I think the kX project drivers work with those Dell cards too IIRC.

CT numbers? Here are mine (might have a few more, but don't feel like digging everything i have to find a couple more):

CT1600
CT1740
CT1910
CT1930
CT1950
CT2290
CT2760
CT2830
CT2860
CT2940
CT3620
CT4170
CT4390
CT4500
CT4620
CT4660
CT4670
CT4810
CT4830
CT6670
CT6710
CT6750
CT6810
CT6970
CT7120
CT7260

What is your impression of the output quality of the Encore Dxr2?

I don't have the card, so I don't know
it was OK seeing it on my friend's computer at the time when he got it new

I keep forgetting one obscure SB16 variant that I own. Its not an ISA card, but a plug-in module that connects to my PowerMac 6100/66's DOS Compatibility Card. It is a 100% Creative chip powered SB16 using the Vibra chip + a real OPL3 chip! The card even came with Apple branded disks with all the original SB16 installer software. I ought to run DIAGNOSE and see what version DSP it came with. The card does have a joystick port, but I have no clue if it also supports MIDI I/O. I suppose I should test it out with the MT-32.

Someone here already took pictures: PC compatibility cards

interesting... I doubt creative made the card because creative sold the vibra chips to OEMs for systems integration... many of them ended up in laptops and were advertised to have a real SB16 (but not entirely true 😉)

You sir, are a true fan!

elianda wrote:

What is your impression of the output quality of the Encore Dxr2?

Desktop quality takes a hit. DVD quality is crappy, but no skipped frames. Guess that running it with an LCD makes it worst...

NJRoadfan wrote:

I keep forgetting one obscure SB16 variant that I own. Its not an ISA card, but a plug-in module that connects to my PowerMac 6100/66's DOS Compatibility Card. It is a 100% Creative chip powered SB16 using the Vibra chip + a real OPL3 chip! The card even came with Apple branded disks with all the original SB16 installer software. I ought to run DIAGNOSE and see what version DSP it came with. The card does have a joystick port, but I have no clue if it also supports MIDI I/O. I suppose I should test it out with the MT-32.

Someone here already took pictures: PC compatibility cards

I'll have to check my Macs. I have one 6100 DOS compatible that came with the card installed and another one that came without the card, but I later bought it separately. I wasn't aware there was a real sound blaster on there, I just thought it was some generic sound blaster clone.

sprcorreia wrote:

elianda wrote:

What is your impression of the output quality of the Encore Dxr2?

Desktop quality takes a hit. DVD quality is crappy, but no skipped frames. Guess that running it with an LCD makes it worst...

I forgot that it doesn't help that it doesn't use the VESA feature connector but through analog piggy back cables through the card like the voodoo 2 instead

My Dxr3 card (actually a re-branded Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus) had similar degradation. The MPEG2 decoder quality was excellent however.

Well my impression of the Dxr2 is also not very good.
DVD Player software seems to work ok, basic functionality. Though it can also play mpeg2 video files.
The Hardware decoder seems to have a limited maximum resolution. It can decode a bit more lines than necessary for NTSC and much less than necessary for PAL. This means for PAL DVDs the lower part of the video is cut off always.

Placing of the overlay is ok (this is a real video overlay by color keying), but only possible in a few modes.
You can set some video options as brightness,contrast, saturation but it seems that the basic problem is a low dynamic range. I think it might have something to do with a limited resolution of the decoding chip (some low bit integer?)
Deinterlacing seems to be also not very effective.

So overall it plays limited resolution DVDs (ntsc) and video files, video quality is bad.

Interested in some footage? 😉

Yeah, you said it all. I have a Commodore MPEG1 ISA card that connects through internal feature connector and the video has much more quality than the crappy DXR2... It really is something (for the time it was available, mind you).

That Commodore card sounds awesome! My brother had (still has it even with the promo DVD which includes 1999 vintage DVD news) a Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus card (No Creative branding) and it had awesome quality output. There was even a hack around for it that allowed any VfW codec AVI to play on the TV output of it.