Hi,

I'm playing around with the idea of streaming on Twitch using one of my old PCs. My first thought was to use a HDMI capture card (which I already had), but the fact that I want to also use a VGA CRT display at the same time adds to the complication. While the VGA->HDMI conversion itself is easy and produces decent enough results (tested with a cheap converter from AliExpress), VGA splitter deteriorates quality pretty badly (at least the one I have).

My next thought was to forget the idea of using my old Riva TNT graphics card, and instead use a card with multiple video outputs, preferably DVI being one of them (already digital, no conversion for the HDMI capture card needed). I had a Pentium 4 PC with Sapphire Radeon X1650Pro (AGP) laying around, and it turned out to work pretty much perfectly: this card clones the display to both outputs by default (so I can capture even the BIOS screen or bootup sequence), and in Windows I can force cloning displays via Omega graphics drivers. Aside from a few glitches here and there, it does the job.

However... I really wanted to use Windows 98, and unfortunately X1650Pro doesn't have drivers for this OS. So, I thought I'd just buy a cheapo Radeon that still supports 98, and so I got a 9600 (also from Sapphire), and installed it in my other machine with K7S5A mobo. However, as it turned out this card does not handle multiple monitors in the same way as X1650Pro did. There are two issues:
- the card doesn't clone displays by default; when both VGA and DVI are connected, it only outputs to DVI, unless you override that via drivers (impossible outside OS).
- cloning works when forced via Omega drivers, but when you run a fullscreen app the second display is turned off for whatever reason. This doesn't seem to be an OS/driver issue; the same thing happens on Windows 2000 (which uses the same drivers as XP). X1650Pro doesn't have the same problem, I can run fullscreen DOS programs and the display is still cloned.

So, the display cloning works pretty much only when running windowed apps in the OS. The card itself seems to work fine, it just handles multiple monitors not in a way that I expected. Now, I understand that this is just the way the card was designed, and it's not possible to fix via drivers. But maybe the 9600 BIOS can be modified somehow, so that it behaves like X1650Pro? I'm not getting my hopes up, but thought to ask just in case.

Of course I could just grab a cheapo 4:3 LCD monitor with DVI input, which would solve the issue - splitting DVI/HDMI doesn't wreck the image quality like VGA splitter does. But where's the fun in that? 😜