I found one of these on Ebay and it looked interesting. There's no VGA pass-through, it just uses the VGA feature connector to drop the decoded video into the framebuffer. I like quirky hardware, so I figured I would give it a shot. Luckily, it came with a driver disk.

I installed this in my PII alongside a Voodoo 5 AGP. That is NOT on the (short) list of supported chipsets, but I strapped them together with a short floppy ribbon cable and got .... something in the PC-DVD player window. It kind of looked like the first 8 lines or so were actually showing decoded video, all smooshed together. The rest of the window was filled with a mess of green, pink, and white. On a whim, I full-screened the window, and... voila! Perfect decoded MPEG2!

I tried resizing the playback window and eventually got it to fill the window correctly. It seems to be somewhat random what works. I tried changing the screen resolution, which seemed to help. Originally it was at 1280x1024, 16-bit. I changed it to 1024x768, 32-bit. That worked at the default size. The player refused to work in 256-color mode (claiming it will only support 16-bit or higher modes.)

I still have two old games that came with my original DXR2 kit from back in the late 90s... Claw and Wing Commander IV. Claw works great. It loaded right up and played the intro video. This did NOT work before the decoder card was installed -- even with the K-Lite codec pack installed. (Not that the 350MHz CPU would be able to keep up with software decoding anyway...) OTOH, WC4 did not work. It played the video, but the screen is a mess of Pepto and Mint snow. If you press Esc to skip the video sequences, you can see "Help him out." on the top of the screen, but the other option is lost in the noise. It definitely seems like the game resolution is incompatible with the framebuffer.

So I'm wondering if anyone has gone down this road before and found a solution. I really want this to work. I love the direct connection -- I used the DXR2 board with the pass-through VGA cable for years back in the day. Back then, my GF at the time and I shared an appt, and we would split the computer. She watched DVDs on the TV through the composite output and the rear stereo out of my SB Live, and I would play on the computer through the monitor and the front stereo out into headphones. But it did no favors to the crisp Matrox RAMDAC having that card in-line.