First post, by kaputnik
- Rank
- Oldbie
Installed my old Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo card in my P233MMX machine a while ago.
When passing through video from the S3 Trio64v2 DX, there's narrow diagonal banding, slowly creeping over the screen. The vertical edges of the picture are wavy. Higher resolutions seems to worsen the problem, but it's clearly noticeable in low res too. It's notoriously hard to capture it in a still picture, the creeping makes it so much more obvious (and annoying), but see the attachment.
Except for the slight smeariness to be expected from old S3 cards, output directly from the Trio64 as well as 3D video from the Voodoo card is perfect, no visible interference at all.
Ruled out the passthrough cable. Tested two factory made ones, and made one myself to be certain about the quality, without any noticeable difference.
Can't remember this occurring in the 90's when I bought the card, but had a 15" CRT back then, which probably was way more forgiving when it comes to interference than a modern 19" LCD. It also maxed out at 800x600 IIRC. It could be a design problem just as well as aging components, etc.
Solved it temporarily by simply not using passthrough, got the S3 and Voodoo card connected to different inputs on the monitor, letting the monitor do the switching. This is however much slower, and I'd really like to go back to using passthrough if possible.
So, has anyone here experienced something along these lines, and found a solution? Is it just a question of replacing aging caps or something like that, can it be fixed by modding the output circuitry, etc?
There are no electromechanical relays doing the switchover on this particular card, it's all solid state stuff. Can semiconductors leaking noise perhaps be the problem?