Great! Let me know what you think.

OpenRift wrote on 2025-08-27, 19:30:

Hey, I'm in the market for a good MS-DOS VGA capture solution that isn't too expensive. I haven't read all 75 pages of this thread (I don't even know what I should be looking for at this point), but I've gathered some bits and pieces. The Sewell Manta and Startech VGA2HDMIPRO seem to be really solid options, but neither seem to be available for purchase anymore, new nor used. I wish the RetroTink 4K CE was something I could get, but even being the reduced cost model, $475 is still pretty steep for something I don't even know if I'll use enough.

Are there any other solid solutions that I've glossed over?

I use a Datapath VisionAV HD PCIe capture card on Windows 11 with the final windows release of VCS and have no complaints. I haven't found a video signal yet that it couldn't handle; DOS is no problem, Sync-on-Green at a weird resolution from the S24 card in the SPARCstation 5 was fine, the weird VGA output from the RS/6000 that no IP-KVM or LCD monitor I've tried can handle did need a little tweaking to get the picture on screen properly but once that was done its been fine. I've not tried EGA/CGA but I've heard that it should work with a few extra bits to deal with signal levels.

The cards are still available for purchase new but cost a fortune. I got mine second-hand on ebay for US$70.

Dusko wrote on 2025-08-29, 06:12:

Great! Let me know what you think.

Just got it in the mail today and it works great!! The auto-adjust feature puts a lot of my worries about the scaling and image fitting to rest. I will say, my one complaint is that the color isn't all that great, with the whites and blacks not being as bright/dark as they are on my CRT. Is there a way to fix that? It's not a huge dealbreaker or anything, but if I can fix it with some kind of LUT or something, it would be much appreciated.

Interesting. I’ve never had any color issues with mine. Here’s a screenshot of Norton Commander captured with an EZCap GameDock Ultra. It’s not the best capture card out there, but it works just fine for my needs.

Update: I managed to get it looking acceptable using some color correction in Streamlabs OBS, and I'm happy with the results.

I have an OSSC Pro which I use for all my upscaling needs, and it's just okay. It's fine, but nothing special. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably go with the Retrotink 4k CE. The OSSC Pro works but is lacking a little polish. For example, mine doesn't keep its settings when powered off for long enough. Sometimes it has trouble figuring out the video input, and I have to wiggle the cables or unplug and plug back in. It has a TON of settings, but 99% are already set at the optimal value. Depending on the input and the settings, you can get really clean insanely beautiful output, or something less good. It's very uneven. Sometimes it's gorgeous, other times its mediocre.

Overall, it's kindof a mixed bag which is why I say its just okay. But the whole user experience feels very unpolished and uneven. I will say that it's good enough that I feel no reason to upgrade, but it's not so good that I would recommend it. It will work for your upscaling needs, but I would nudge anyone towards the Retrotink instead.

The one thing I will say that I think the OSSC Pro does well is color reproduction. It does have a crazy degree of customization, but weirdly I don't find it to be all that useful. Maybe if I was using really bizarre input sources...

My focus when capturing is mostly VGA and DVI sources. For this purpose, I too give the Datapath VisionRGB E1s/E2s a strong recommendation. It’s the only device you need for capturing those two specific video sources, unless you’re dealing with completely untamed video cards and/or drivers.

On the software side I use a combination of Vision (bundled software with the Datapath drivers), VCS (VisionRGB Capture Scaler) and OBS Studio. The trick is to tweak the signal in Vision to your liking (only really necessary for VGA sources, DVI is straightforward) by setting the horizontal size and positioning (etc.), then do a window capture of VCS’ window in OBS Studio, not DirectShow capturing. Worth noting that I’m almost completely copying Nerdly Pleasure’s capturing setup from their post on Datapath VisionRGB capturing.

This software setup has a lot of advantages. In case the Vision drivers are somehow reporting a resolution that’s slightly off from the source’s resolution, VCS let’s you force the resolution to anything you want. If a source ISA/PCI VGA video card’s vertical size can’t be set quite the way you want on the capture card (it refuses to go further up or down than you would have liked and it shows a few rows/columns of black pixels outside of the framebuffer area) this can potentially be solved by either using a different refresh rate or installing a utility/control panel for that specific card and tweaking the image on a driver level. When used in combination with a scaler for capturing consoles or interlaced RGB computer sources, the VisionRGB is also quite useful and with OBS Studio you can perform final cropping of the input to eliminate pillar-boxing (black bars) in games that display a 4:3 aspect ratio image. Since VCS is also a scaler application, you can use the mouse wheel on the window to scale up the VGA/DVI source’s resolution (for larger pixels) and capture this directly instead of resizing in post, if you have the processing power and storage to do so!

I have been using this capture chain with a Core i7-2600K system (using 2011 components) for a while now as this setup uses very little CPU resources! A secondary monitor is also not needed as the PCI-E bandwidth translates to almost instant response time in both the VCS and OBS preview, which makes for a very compact capture hardware setup. For a more accurate preview I recommend using the VCS window, since OBS weirdly alternates in few-second intervals between a 60fps and 30fps preview on my system.

Before delving into VGA capture, I decided to check how things were going with DVI capture (it's much cheaper way). And to my regret, it's useless for pixel-perfect capture...

I noticed that my AGP cards (Radeon 9250, FX5200) are upscaling native BIOS/DOS resolution to 1280x1024 via DVI output. I guess it's for compatibility with modern LCD monitors, but I don't like the blurry picture.

Is there any way to get native BIOS/DOS resolution via DVI (VBIOS mod or something)?

VGA output
BIOS: 640x480@60Hz
DOS: 720x400@60Hz

DVI output
BIOS: 1280x1024@60Hz
DOS: 1280x1024@60Hz

ott wrote on 2025-10-03, 13:20:

Before delving into VGA capture, I decided to check how things were going with DVI capture (it's much cheaper way). And to my re […]
Show full quote

Before delving into VGA capture, I decided to check how things were going with DVI capture (it's much cheaper way). And to my regret, it's useless for pixel-perfect capture...

I noticed that my AGP cards (Radeon 9250, FX5200) are upscaling native BIOS/DOS resolution to 1280x1024 via DVI output. I guess it's for compatibility with modern LCD monitors, but I don't like the blurry picture.

Is there any way to get native BIOS/DOS resolution via DVI (VBIOS mod or something)?

VGA output
BIOS: 640x480@60Hz
DOS: 720x400@60Hz

DVI output
BIOS: 1280x1024@60Hz
DOS: 1280x1024@60Hz

DVI is perfect for everything "normal" in windows. Everything concerning DOS (including BIOS) will be scaled to the connected DVI device (e.g. for the retrotink4k it just goes to 1080p). Afaik this is called "EDID".
So In theory you could potentially "fake" a connected Monitor with your designed target resolution. But this would be a total hassle to change each time. Also keep in mind that dos actually using 320x200 in games in a 720x400 container. Same goes for 640x400. I am not sure how this would actually look like on a hypothetical 720x400 screen, but potentially they would still be broken.

Kordanor wrote on 2025-10-03, 13:34:

DVI is perfect for everything "normal" in windows. Everything concerning DOS (including BIOS) will be scaled to the connected DVI device (e.g. for the retrotink4k it just goes to 1080p). Afaik this is called "EDID".

I was a bit hasty with my first conclusion, DVI output works fine in Windows games, I can get native 640x480 without upscaling.

I'll try to figure it out with EDID for DOS, big thanks!

ott wrote on 2025-10-03, 15:04:

Kordanor wrote on 2025-10-03, 13:34:

DVI is perfect for everything "normal" in windows. Everything concerning DOS (including BIOS) will be scaled to the connected DVI device (e.g. for the retrotink4k it just goes to 1080p). Afaik this is called "EDID".

I was a bit hasty with my first conclusion, DVI output works fine in Windows games, I can get native 640x480 without upscaling.

I'll try to figure it out with EDID for DOS, big thanks!

Good luck with that and please do share successes and failures on that front.

Behavior of a video card's DVI/HDMI port is dictated by the video card BIOS's EDID processing logic. In my experience, so far, on both Nvidia and ATI/AMD based cards, the vBIOS will either typically scale to the monitor's advertised native resolution OR to a "preferred" specific one among the advertised ones. I vaguely recall previously having tried to program an EDID with ONLY the timings of DOS VGA mode 13h multiplied by various factors (2, 3, etc) and not being successful. I might have posted about it at the time.

That being said, if the purpose is primarily video capture, I believe you can disable Nvidia DVI scaling completely in DOS at least on GeForceFX (maybe not all of them) and earlier cards which, if combined with a custom EDID that has the right timings (same vertical refresh as the mode being captured), MIGHT produce a postage stamp sized, unscaled image, surrounded by black pixels and with the the right timings. Not sure if I had tried that approach as it would not have been practical for actual gaming, IMHO, but I'm pretty sure someone did bring it up and remember responding to that post.