I've been playing around with Virtualdub using your settings and gotten some promising results.

Sometimes I'll get inserted frames which I suspect are due to either weird menu transitions/freezes or just startup of actual recording. But if I woke the machine up, did a quick record/abort it seems to go away with subsequent files. MagicYUV codec came out looking pretty good, not sure if I am gonna purchase it just yet (I'd have other uses for it).

I just wish there was an easy way to get x264vfw output into an MP4 I can drop directly into Vegas. If I go with file output mode I don't think I'd get incrementing filenames or anything which sucks too. But my capture card only captures in YUY2 I think (I believe the RGB is either fake, or there are driver issues preventing it from working that way). I hate having to remux AVIs although them being small compared to a lossless AVI makes it rather painless I suppose.

Maybe in another week or so I'll be able to try capturing from the DOS machine, still waiting on some parts.

Well, now that I have this $60.00 Desktop I built out in a cool InWin D500 chassis running Windows 10, I'm planning in about 4-5 months to hit up RE-PC again for some more parts, and grab one of the DV Capture cards in the bin, and use that with BandiCam so I can do modern "Let's Plays" using Vintage Hardware (complete with clicky keys and mouse and me rambling over an AWE64/Tandy 3-voice/SBPro2).

The key piece to this setup though is this little USB powered converter box I got my hands on about a year or so ago, It converts VGA into Composite, and it works pretty well and gives a pretty clean signal. In the case of the Tandy I can go direct in and use A Y cable to split the audio into stereo, but my 486 and 286 are SVGA and will go through this thing is a 1/8" Phono to RCA Y adapter cable for the audio inputs.

If I do go this route I want to do my Let's Plays by starting off the first episode of each game with the computer booting up from POST....sort of a proof of what the game is running on.

That's a neat concept. How will it handle the resolution changes though. From what I've seen/heard most capture cards except really expensive ones tend to flake out and be a crapshoot on whether they will handle it well

I've tested the StarTech VGA2HDPRO2, and it's really a good product but it has one big flaw... No support for 720x400@70 so no VGA text modes, BIOS or old games (tested only with DOOM). With that resolution the scaler shows an "unsupported" message, but anything above or equal to 640x480 is perfect (crispy and adjustable).

P.S. English isn’t my first language, so please excuse any mistakes 😵

ViTi95 wrote:

I've tested the StarTech VGA2HDPRO2, and it's really a good product but it has one big flaw... No support for 720x400@70 so no VGA text modes, BIOS or old games (tested only with DOOM). With that resolution the scaler shows an "unsupported" message, but anything above or equal to 640x480 is perfect (crispy and adjustable).

For some reason, the old version supports this. I would try contacting them, maybe they can release a new firmware? That was the main highlight for me when recommending it as you could capture everything in one hit, but the new version I can't recommend as so many other devices can do 640 x 480 and higher just as well without the loss of quality because of scaling the resolution.

rodimus80 wrote:

It's the Micomsoft SC-512N1-L/DVI. You guys mentioned it earlier in the thread. I'm looking to stream old PCs on twitch with the absolute most faithful picture.

I've recently shared the same interest. So just posting some game capture information that I have been doing. Thought I would fish for some opinions.
Testing captures of a DOS / Win9x system. Started mainly with interest towards a 3dfx Voodoo2 for video and an Aureal SQ2500 for digital 2CH audio.

In a dedicated PC, my capture card is a StarTech PEXHDCAP60L. I was getting some analog noise when capturing with VGA from the Voodoo2. I used very heavy shielded cable too. I was also concerned the same may be true about the analog audio. So I came up with this idea to adapt it all to HDMI. It produces a very clean image. Find a VGA to HDMI converter, that does no scaling. It also makes for a very coinvient way to deliver audio if you mix it onto the same cable.

3dfx Voodoo2 (VGA) -> HDMI adapter -> StarTech PEXHDCAP60L DVI adapted HDMI input (with audio!).

NightSprinter wrote:

I have the previous revision in the StarTech packaging. It does not support some of the more esoteric resolution/refresh combos out there between 50-60Hz, also has no capability of capturing 70Hz (critical for MS-DOS capture via RGB).

I really liked both of these. The Hammerhead is "better" in the sense that it supports a lot more VGA input resolutions, such as those found in POST and DOS. However it only has analog audio input. So the MNXO is another I tested, which supports optical audio input. Works great, but it does not support as many obscure VGA input resolutions. Both are very handy.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M6B46WK
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006LP0FXA

So the point being, instead of capturing directly from VGA output, to a VGA input, what are your opinions on this approach? I can find no noticeable lag. I even introduced a 2 port HDMI splitter. One going to my HDTV or Gaming monitor while I play, and the other to the capture device.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089DSLMY

Do you think this approach messes with any color formats? The adapters do absolutely no scaling. I can send 1024x768 exactly to an HDTV (that understands the resolution) and a capture device with HDMI in. It does not show up as 720p or 1080p on either. I have not tried multi channel audio, but the adapter is supposed to support it. I just don't know if you can capture it.

3dfx Voodoo2 (VGA) ------------------------> VGA2HDMI adapter --> HDMI 2x splitter --> HDTV
Aureal SQ2500 (Analog or Optical) -----^...................................................................--> StarTech PEXHDCAP60L

Any reason to think the PEXHDCAP60L is not as good as or equivilent to a Micomsoft SC-512N1-L/DVI ?

Well if you got some converter from VGA and it uses 8 bit DACs then you get 24 bit RGB. HDMI supports various color spaces, so it might be converted to YCbCr. With some input device you should be able to see if HDMI delivers RGB or YCbCr.
If you want to to actually see what you loose in colors you can just do the digital analog and convert some colorful image from RGB to YCbCr and look at the differences.

I looked at this with the DVI2PCie with RGB vs YUV and the color space conversion is visible in direct comparison.

Some vga test capture with the old datapath visionrgb-pro and a voodoo 3.
Vga mode 13h: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj8z5D9bGdE
Dos text mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFnF2YtRbU

The datapath card is fed via pci passthrough (vfio) from ubuntu 16.04 to a windows 7 guest in kvm, and captured from a region over the virtual machine's desktop (running the windows-only visionrgb software) with simplescreenrecorder.

The text mode capture has some horizontal glitches that don't seem to exist in the 13h capture (or in windows), as far as I can immediately tell. Some other guy in this thread had the same issue with this capture card and the voodoo 3, so need to look into it.

Images from source video (upscaled). The first shows a horizontal glitch in text mode.

hey vvbee, is it the pci or agp version of the voodoo 3 you are using?
This problem with the horizontal line glitching is much more prominent with my AGP Voodoo 3 3000 but with my PCI Voodoo 3 2000 it is much more of a rarity.
I feel its something to do with the quality of output from the Voodoo 3 series of cards. I haven't heard of anyone having the same problem with SLI Voodoo 2s.

I'm still to try the above mentioned method of converting the signal using a VGA to HDMI adaptor to see if that helps smooth it out.
Post back if you find a fix or method of at least alleviating the severity of the glitching.

W.

It's the agp version. This particular phenomenon was a phase issue, easily suppressed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkfsZYzGN_g. It's not fully eliminated in that example, but it seems possible with some tweaking.

So is this a problem with your capture solution or a general issue with the Voodoo3 ?
I can not remember having seen such issues here.

I've been playing around with my new to me video capture setup.

Capture card - Avermedia C127 Extreme PCIe HD
VGA to HDMI scaler with audio - ATLONA AT-HD500

Everything works good including DOS/Boot resolutions.

I installed the drivers/software for the Avermedia card from here:
http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/avermedia.htm

I then went to Avermedia and was looking around and found that the C985 has the same main version of RECentral, so I decided to test out the newest version available.
And what do ya know.. it upgraded and works fine.

The newest version available as of right now is:
1.3.0.112
Released 2-22-2017

The latest version officially released for the C127 was
1.3.0.42
Released some time between January and June 2013.

Basically just a bunch of fixes, the most notable being HDCP and official support for Windows 10.

Wrote a program, vcapturescaler, for the datapath visionrgb-pro card to do better-quality capture than what you get with the datapath viewer.
https://github.com/leikareipa/vcapturescaler

elianda wrote:

So is this a problem with your capture solution or a general issue with the Voodoo3 ?
I can not remember having seen such issues here.

I'll test this later with another card/pc.

A vga capture image quality comparison between the voodoo 3 and geforce 2 ti with the visionrgb-pro. Windows desktop, 640x480, and brief outcast gameplay, 320x240. The capture card appears to output 320x240 as 640x480, but requires tweaking the phase setting from 640x480 lest artefacts appear with 320x240 as input, not sure how that works. Still, once it's good for 320x240, it works for 640x480 too. With 320x240 as input, the image is shifted slightly to the right with the voodoo 3.

Voodoo 3 (k6 300) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCie-G3UEIU
Geforce 2 ti (athlon xp 2200) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR_QLGIyXGQ (some skipping in the game, likely for using a usb cd-rom drive here, unlike for the voodoo 3 machine)

Scaled to 720p using vcapturescaler from which recorded to video, video upscaled 2x nearest neighbor with ffmpeg, and off to youtube. Both captures were pre-color-calibrated by hand so that black = 0, white ~ 255, mid-gray ~128, and pure red, green, blue with ~255 and 0 in their respective channels.

Not much difference between the two sources, save for the obviously darker voodoo 3 and more reddish geforce 2, despite them having about the same balance on the desktop. Whether you can further correct this color balance imbalance with the capture card's own settings (refer to the rgbeasy sdk docs) I don't know, but I prefer the voodoo 3 in this case.

Well I started my new channel, and THIS is what I'm using now to DV Capture, I only have a trailer up currently and still need to pay for Bandicam.....

COMPUTER - Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz w/ 4GB of RAM in a InWin D500 mATX chassis with Intel On-Board Video

CAPTURE DEVICES

For my VGA Machines I'm using a VGA to Composite converter box that's powered by the USB port on the Core 2. It allows me to pass the video signal through to my monitor as well. I have the older version of this basically - http://www.allthings.com.au/Catalogue/PC%20MA … 20converter.htm

For the Tandy 1000 I just use Composite straight off it with the NEC MultiSync II attached - this forces it to go into color PC mode.

These go into a VIDBOX VHS to DVD USB Converter box, which is basically a USB DV capture device marketed to people looking to convert their VHS to digital formats, and then are input into Bandicam - at least the video signal is.

The audio signal path, in general, I'm running the 486's Line Level output to the PC via Line-In - but it's a little more complex as the Core 2 is also my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) - so it actually passes through my Roland Juno Di Synthesizer - which allows me to also add a Microphone feed into the mix (commentary), and then feeds into a guitar amplifier (Blackstar IDCORE 10) and then into the PC in sort of a daisy chain. Let's just say if I want to use the vintage PCs to CREATE some chiptune stuff to play over, I can do that as well.

Here's an example of my first recordins with it to make The Creeping Net Channel trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBWt8UJc4gU

My current setup is like this:
Main gaming rig has a Epiphan VGA2PCIe and BT878 based TV card with Win10 x64.
Capture computer has a DVI2PCIe (and also a BT878 card) and can capture for (e.g. live) streaming from the main gaming rig by HDMI in up to 1920x1200 at 60 fps.
This means that everything the main gaming pc shows can be streamed and capture does not influence performance as it is done by another computer.
So I can play modern games, capture from old DOS games as well as from old home computers via the BT878 card. For viewing from the capture devices on the main rig I use the self patched up version of DScaler released in another forum here. This is important since sources like C64 require a special deinterlacer to show a correct image (which is called f.e. in OBS retro/scandoubler).
As secondary source the capture rig has two webcams to either capture us or some table that allows to show stuff in detail.

Hi, as folks here probably pretty much know, capturing from real hardware avoids the pitfalls of emulation, but it has some issues of its own, with lots of capture devices failing to sync to unusual modes (or perfectly usual modes like 70Hz text), dropping the stream when the video mode changes, or otherwise glitching out.

So I had the idea of building a device that would be to video capture what a Kryoflux is to disk capture — a piece of hardware that would capture the rawest data possible and let the computer sort it out later. In short, it would sample the R/G/B/H/V components of a VGA signal at 50+ MSPS, and send the raw (or very minimally compressed) data to a host computer over USB3 for storage. Turning the raw data into watchable video would be done after the fact, allowing for perfect sync lock, graceful handling of mode changes, and the best possible quality reconstruction. You would need a decent computer, an SSD, and probably on the order of 1TB/hour of disk space for intermediate files, but the result would be archival quality.

Has anyone already done any work in this direction that I just haven't stumbled upon? If not, it is because it's a crazy idea, or just because it's one that just reached the point of practicality? I'm more of a software than a hardware guy, but the hardware seems plausible. Maybe an existing USB "oscilloscope" or DAQ is already up to the task of doing the capture? Am I wrong in thinking that it's buildable? Seems to me like the required hardware is some moderately expensive ADCs, a USB interface (e.g. Cypress FX3), and perhaps an FPGA or CPLD between them to marshal the data (though perhaps not if the GPIF is capable enough). Lastly, if it existed, would people want it? I'm not looking to design a product for sale, but I do think that projects are more interesting when I'm not the only person who cares about them.

Earlier, I had a look to see whether it's usual for manufacturers to provide end-user programming interfaces to access their capture cards' output, and it seemed to me that it was. Therefore, and given that there are such capture cards on the second-hand market for not much money that also handle enough modes for regular retro capture, a more encompassing solution seems unnecessary. But for a more niche/demanding market, why not.

@arodland: This is exactly what the better capture cards do. They are basically 3 channel scopes with trigger on HSync and sample rate is synced by PLL to the pixel clock.

elianda wrote:

So I can play modern games, capture from old DOS games as well as from old home computers via the BT878 card. For viewing from the capture devices on the main rig I use the self patched up version of DScaler released in another forum here. This is important since sources like C64 require a special deinterlacer to show a correct image (which is called f.e. in OBS retro/scandoubler).

If you aren't using OBS, Avisynth can properly deinterlace material from an analog source like the C64.