I took one for the team. I bought this USB capture device for ten bucks. It has a UTV007 chipset which apparently does a decent job of converting S-Video. I will test it out with the S-Video out of a few PCI cards I have lying around and report back.

Does anyone know a way to screen capture on XP? I tried OBS but it wanted to use DX10 and needed Vista or greater for that. I'm currently trying Afterburner...

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-02-01, 20:12:

Does anyone know a way to screen capture on XP? I tried OBS but it wanted to use DX10 and needed Vista or greater for that. I'm currently trying Afterburner...

Maybe try OBS Classic? OBS Studio came out way later.

Fraps? ^^

Regarding my matrix:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14CrBt … dit?usp=sharing

Fraps, Bandicam and Camtasia,Dxtory have / had XP support.

xjas maybe there could be a Dreamcast VGA round 3?

I recently realized a few useful cases for checking out the blocky bilinear filtering (which is common on PVR1 and PVR3, but hard to find lossless shots of PVR2 but I do believe it's the same as PVR3 for all channels):

- Illbleed. Loads of low res textures in that but even better are bloody scenes that shoot blood textures real close up to the screen so it's an extreme closeup of red texels on an alpha texture (and sometimes brown). Bleeding doors, bloody showers and toilets work best. Also surprisingly, there's not much apparent VQ texture compression involved. Youtube only has composite and emulator captures.
- Quake III Arena. It's a FPS game with a zoom button. There's layered alpha textures around the walls.
- Sonic Adventure. Tails' story starts with a more smokey crash, and walking in pools of water (i.e. the pool, chao garden) can get the camera real close to the water texels. I believe texels lose color some filtering precision when additive blended.
- D2. The big stretched out snow texture should show little texel differences and appear clearly blocky. I think this even showed in old press shots... There's also zoom
- Army Men Sarge's Heroes. It's still literally the texture resolution of the N64 game, so blocks should show easily. Also there's zoom!!

I'd want to focus my next PVR2 shader adventures on the texture filtering, and I did stock up on PVR1-related research material on that at least. Basically i'm looking for these

^^ Sure, I can do those! I've been meaning to move my DC out to my gaming/capture area anyway. I'll try to get you some good shots in the next few days.

I also have a Matrox m3D in my K6-2 right next to the capture rig if that helps.

Another thing about DC VGA captures is curiousity about the green and some obvious channel shift/bleed. I've noticed some of this on official Toy Commander screenshots from '99 which had some similar artifacts to your earlier captures! Wonder if different DC models/VGA adapters affect that...

I've been working on trying to capture S-Video output for DOS stuff instead of VGA but I gave up on it after trying with various cards for a couple of weeks. The color and sharpness is just too bad to make any meaningful capture viable 🙁 Time to invest in decent VGA capture gear - back to square 1. *SIGH* 38 pages of VOGONS to read through tonight 🤣

Hello Vogonians. I have been following this site for awhile and it's been a great help so it's time to post something myself.
I had some problems with VGA capture too and I found out about the Manta VGA-HDMI but unfortunately it was sold out everywhere. After long search I found one generic(?) VGA-HDMI 4K upscaler which works great even in DOS resolutions. The one I got doesn't have any brand name but it goes by Digitech and Voxlink branding as well. They all look the same. Only difference is the logo. I'm 99% sure it works pretty much the same as Sewell Manta did but with 2K and 4K support added on top of 720p and 1080p. You can find it around 30-50$ on various sites, ebay, chinese market sites, etc. Just look for a black metal box (yes it's metal to keep it cool) that looks same as the images attached. The seller's title for my upscaler was as intuitive as "Video Converter VGA To HDMI 4K Scaler HD Audio Analog To Digital Conversion 4K*2K HDMI Out For PC Laptop VGA Monitor Ultra HDTV"

Did you get this from AliExpress? Do you have any capture samples you can share? Does it automatically upscale, or can that be turned off or set to integer scaling?

Yes, I got it from Aliexpress. Currently I can't post any capture samples because my Avermedia LGP Lite doesn't like upscalers and gives black screen. It doesn't like much my other non-upscaling converter either. I'm waiting for other capture device in mail so I can post some samples. Image looks good on my DVI monitor with DVI-HDMI cable. Later after my work I can try to post some photos taken from my monitor.
RES. button on the upscaler recycles through 720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K resolutions. Upscaling can't be turned off or set to any different upscaling methods. I'm just satisfied it keeps constant output resolution for capture, because usually OBS needs to be restarted when input resolution changes. Which is quite often in DOS environment.

EDIT:
Here are some sample images taken from my monitor. The VGA output quality of my trusty Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT (which I plan to write about on later date once I get all the stuff I ordered for it) is not the best in the world and looks a bit different depending if you use clone mode or external output only.
You can see one of the differences in how it handles BIOS output. In external only it stretches the BIOS screen to full screen but in clone mode it squashes it a bit. But thats just the quirks of my own laptop harware.
Pixels look sharp and with newer harware it looks even better.
My camera can't focus well on the full screen images so for the pixel quality please check those closeups.
I hope this was helpful for anyone.

@Master1UP
Can you post some DOS / Freedos Text-modes or 320x200 or 320x240 games, OSD (if there is some) photos?

Here are some sample pictures of DOS text editor and couple games.
Too bad I can't provide those OBS captures yet because mail is currently super slow due to this situation.
And funny thing is I forgot my DSLR at work and I can't pick it up because it's closed for a month so my somewhat blurry photos will have to do for now.

Thanks.

@Master1UP:

Are you from Finland? I love how the editor says "F1=Ohje". F1 is of course for help and "Ohje" is coincidentally German for "Oh dear!". 🤣

@derSammler
Yeah i'm Finnish. Funny coincidence that "help" and "oh dear" are close meaning.

Good news everyone!
I got my capture device today and I made some long awaited screen captures with the VGA - HDMI 4K scaler.
I captured them with OBS with input and output resolutions as 1080p and I squeezed the 1080p input to fit 4:3 aspect ratio, hence the black borders.
In "1080 - input output.png" you can see the input resolution is 720x400 @ 70Hz and it accepts and scales it nicely after pressing the "AUTO" button.
Desktop resolution is 800x600.

PS. I don't know if it's my laptops output port or my VGA cable but I have to wiggle it sometimes to make the colors not appear greenish. It's not a huge deal because I'm not moving the laptop from the table anyway once it's set.

that looks pretty bad though 🙁

can't you turn off the excessive filtering somewhere?

You should also review the offset/gain setting. In the third screenshot with the DOS prompt the background should be black and in the fourth screenshot the white should be white...