sliderider wrote:

AGP 4x/8x cards usually don't work in 1x/2x motherboards.

Unless they're year 2001+ cards with voltage regulation

I know you can use a Radeon 7500 and a Kyro II in an AGP1X motherboard thanks to SMARTGART, but not a Savage4 or a Geforce2.

Well, there is another Video incoming.
This time it is a little bit of hardware pr0n. I have a Slot Athlon PC where I attached a C64 via BT878 based TV card and a EWS64XL. The main graphics card is a Voodoo3 3500TV that I configured to 1024x768 at 50 Hz to get it synced with the progressive video of the C64. The TV card infact records always interlaced and this signal is converted on the fly by DScaler deinterlacing filter 'Old Game' to progressive 50 Hz. I have not applied other filters of DScaler, still some are nice for certain situations, f.e. the Temporal Noise filter or watch C64 interlaced graphics really interlaced (which removes the flickering, double vertical resolution). Also not really shown is, that the video can be put into a window while doing other things. And it is noteworthy that using a TFT at 50 Hz does not flicker at all.
The C64 is a Breadbox version with old VIC2, SID 6581R3 and 1541.
I enabled some additional Reverb by the EWS64XL integrated SAM9407 DSP on the Line-In where the SIDs signal is put through. (see ProMIX in video)

The recording itself is 1027x768 at 50 Hz, so it is >HD resolution and the typical slightly blurred pixel edges can be seen that give the C64 image the analog PAL look, though this time for real and no PAL emulation as in Vice. I let the Crest demo Krestology run, that has a lot of interlaced graphics where it is usually difficult to get a good representation. So it is strongly recommended to watch the video with a refresh rate that is n*50 Hz (n > 0).
Some digital art shown in this demo may not be appropriate for very young people.

Link to video coming later, as I try to find the best tradeoff for bitrate, size/quality + upload.

edit:
Well the quality is good, but I ran into the following problem:
To get the interlaced C64 graphics correct represented one source frame has to be exactly one video frame. Now the input signal is usually not exactly 50 Hz, so that after some seconds one frame gets inserted or skipped (null frame). This means the alternate switching of the images gets broken and one frame appears twice. I am uploading the video anyway,

I will try if I can use 640x480 at 50 Hz and record live using XVID.

edit2:
I think I found a better trick. I set the reported source signal for directshow capturing application (as vdub) to 1024x768 at 60 fps. Then I set in vdub that it should not insert additional frames to fill up to 60 fps. As the source has less than 60 fps it really (should) grab the frames 1:1.
And ofcourse sync video to audio stream which is a quite unusual setting.

I finally got around to taking some footage from my Acer 486 machine.

More info about the Acer 486 here:

Re: Mau1wurf1977's first 486 PC - Lot's of pics - Tell me what I can do with it

Anyway here is the video. Shows the BIOS options, the POST and boot, some benchmarks and also some games.

Specs:

486DX-25
4MB onboard RAM
Sound Blaster Pro 2.0
2GB CF card

Quite happy with the quality and you can hook up any machine that has a VGA video card...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao6IgHh4wqI

Ok here is the video: ftp://78.47.153.163/video/c64/krestology.mkv
50 Hz or 100 Hz video mode strongly recommended for playback.

Some workflow note:
Captured with DirectShow setting of 1024x768 and 60 fps frame limit.
Set VirtualDub to not insert null frames if the signal frame rate does not keep up with the set frame rate.
Result is a video file with about 49.86 fps real fps, 60 source fps , audio timing synced to 60 fps.
Video was about 25 mins (assuming 49.86 fps played back at 60 fps) and Audio about 30 mins.
Idea: adjust video to exactly 50 fps and compress/stretch audio for the difference if the 0.14 fps.
First Problem was a bug in virtualdub that it saves the audio stream as wav only as long as the video stream is. So it saved 25 mins, while the audio was really 30 mins.
First I adjusted frame rate to match audio, then saved the complete Audio from the fps matched avi.
Afterwards I adjusted the frame rate to match exactly 50 fps and compressed audio with cool edit so that it fits the video time again.
And combined the streams again with virtualdub. Result is a lossless 50 fps video with synced audio. So far so good.

I thought this was all but when starting x264 encoding with staxrip the x264 encoder failed with some awkward wrong auto detection of the video frame rate. The error was quite cryptic (timebase denominator exceeds .h264 maximum) so I needed some time to find out the cause. Finally forcing a constant frame rate with the additional parameter --fps 50 fixed this problem and it encoded.

Well well, after some people reported problems with rather weak PCs that are unable to decode at a full 50 fps 😉, I made a 25 fps version.
ftp://78.47.153.163/video/c64/krestology25fps.mkv
This combines two 50 fps frames by doing a re-interlace and I resized it to half the original size (which is still 512x384) using bicubic -0.75. This removes any flickering on the graphics but introduces jerky scrollers. Still it looks very good and is suitable for people that can't get 50 Hz compatible modes running.

Hmm does there a filter exists that re-interlaces but keeps the original framerate by interlacing frame [1,2] [2,3] [3,4] ... instead of the usual [1,2] [3,4] [5,6] ... ?

I honestly never thought I would see a c64 demo from my old pal Crossbow posted up here 😮 ...

Well demos from Crest always had quality and style and Roland is really a good coder. While currently NuFLI is the latest and most impressive graphics mode invention on C64 the demo krestology features a lot of interlaced graphics. This is especially difficult to reproduce in a typical video stream because you require to have the video at the correct framerate and also the playback device.
In fact the above 50 fps video does not really flicker much if played back correctly, since the flickering due to interlace is much less on a usual TFT. (brightness of the pixels stays constant)
I still have to record directly from the TV card and deinterlace/frame double this stream to see the quality difference from the different capturing approaches.

Maybe I'm missing something here. But doesn't the C64 have Composite and S-Video out? Why not just capture this signal directly?

With directly I mean why not capture it right at the TV card?

Because I can do it 😉. Well, no.
First of all I wanted to show that using a PC with TV card can be a suitable display device for a C64. I remember that there were long discussions in the german Forum-64 that the quality is problematic due to jerkiness, interlacing etc.
I have it running in such a setup for nearly 10 years now. (Incidentally some of the people that didn't believed, bought recently TFT TV solutions. 😉 ) .

Ofcourse I can capture also using the TV card directly and deinterlace to about 720x288 resolution. As I already wrote, I will do this too for comparison.

🤣 "Because I can".

That's good enough for me 😁

C64 should lend itself well to direct S-Video capture, because, well it was built for hooking it up to TVs.

I can share how I do my S-Video recordings.

I use Cyberlink Director 7 (it came with the S-Video capture card) and record in MPEG-2.

Then I open the MPEG-2 file with AVIDEMUX (freeware). Here I add 3 filters. Firstly deinterlace, then I crop the image (get rid of black stuff) and then resize it to a 4:3 resolution. Depending on my needs I use 640 x 480, 960 x 720 or 1440 x 1080.

AVIDEMUX comes with an MPEG-4 AVC encoder (h264) and I select a constant quantizer of 20 (so that I get a constant quality).

It's quite simple and very fast. The 720 and 1080 options are great for YouTube. Even if you watch them at 480, they look better this way. It's because YouTube will reencode 480 uploads with very low bitrates.

sounds unneccessarily complex. I just use VirtualDub ant a TV card with S-video in, with some composite/svideo cables.

No VGA conversion, I just use video cards with svideo out 😀

Is there an old PCI VGA card with S-video out? I think trident had one

and also, I prefer C64 via TV IN over emulation, because there's no c64 emulator that does the characteristic C64 brightness and color bleeds and such and such.

Problem with C64 and other older computers, is they aren't quite in spec in terms of the video signal, so some capture cards can have a problem with them. They do work perfectly fine on a real monitor or TV because they can cope with the signal a bit more. One thing I noticed about the capture is that all raster lines are drawn, and the c64 was single phase, so there should be blank black lines every other line. It would look better with that imo, as that's how the real thing looks, it also cuts down on the flicker in interlaced stuff. It is hard to capture the color bleeding/smearing though and the persistence of phosphor is not possible to catch at all or emulate yet, and that's also part of it.

Either way it's a nice video, even with the sound sync issues and the occasional bugs in the interlacing.

I used to use VirtualDub a lot, but now that I use W7 it blue screens my machine whenever I do a capture. I googled this and it's a common issue. Maybe one day they will fix it. Works fine inside a VM though.

Cyerblinks PowerDirector is also very decent. Comes as a 30 day trial version to test it out and allows you to do almost anything.

Sony Vegas gets mentioned a lot and I also like Movie Maker, but you can't capture and crop in Movie Maker. It's very basic, but great for a beginner.

RoyBatty wrote:

Problem with C64 and other older computers, is they aren't quite in spec in terms of the video signal, so some capture cards can have a problem with them. They do work perfectly fine on a real monitor or TV because they can cope with the signal a bit more. One thing I noticed about the capture is that all raster lines are drawn, and the c64 was single phase, so there should be blank black lines every other line. It would look better with that imo, as that's how the real thing looks, it also cuts down on the flicker in interlaced stuff. It is hard to capture the color bleeding/smearing though and the persistence of phosphor is not possible to catch at all or emulate yet, and that's also part of it.

Yes a C64 video signal is more problematic than is seems.
f.e. not every TV-in solution works with it. As you see in the video there is a Voodoo3 3500TV running as main graphics card which I could have used already as video-in. Still I had to use a BT878 based card from Hauppauge, since the V3 3500TV is not capable to show a C64 signal.
The rasterline presentation on a real TV differs. By specification you are correct that there should be black lines in between. My experience on a real device is however that those are not really visible on TV (i.e. brightness is nearly identical between).
For the deinterlace after TV card capture you have to use a filter that has no half line shift, where a a usual PAL signal would have a shift of one a half line. From the point of visual signal representation PC equipment gives you more freedom of choice. Especially for the C64 interlace effect you can choose between CRT or TFT at 50 Hz, color bleeding is already simulated by upscaling the original video resolution to a higher screen resolution (as 1024x768 in the video f.e.).

I don't know if there is somewhere a deeper analysis about the different representations and their comparison.

Either way it's a nice video, even with the sound sync issues and the occasional bugs in the interlacing.

Thanks, I have added the comparison video where I recorded from the TV card directly. And you are right the sync of the sound is slightly off in the end. Maybe I was thinking wrong about the audio time compression and should have left it. (i.e. audio was right, but 49.86 fps given were 50 fps).
But then it should be too early and not about a second too late in the end...
Hmm I don't know...
I guess for capturing the method of directly recording from the TV card is well sufficient, but maybe my PC setup gives some inspiration as a machine as the Athlon 650 MHz shown can be as well a nice Retro PC.

The "black lines" might be more visible on NTSC? Seeing they have a lower vertical resolution?

But I can't remember seeing any back in my days (PAL C64 hooked up to RF)

I'm a lazy peson, therefore I would just record C64 stuff using VICE or similar emus...

schlang wrote:

I'm a lazy peson, therefore I would just record C64 stuff using VICE or similar emus...

* cuts his wrists *

🤣

Nah it's cool 😁

I have such fond memories of the C64. But couldn't finish most of the games. I mean I found them very hard.

Also got to say just how limited resources we had as kids back in the day. I stuffed up the sound by shorting the reset pins in the back (I slipped) and then had no sound. Like a year later someone told me that it's likely the fuse and just needs replacing.

I put a fat screw in place of the screw and I had music again!!!

If going to used the Hauppauge Colossus
The main reason for using a Colossus is becases it has a Realtime Hardware H264 Encoder and you can also used the A/V Pass through for Realtime Viewing at the same time.
For VGA it best to get a VGA to Component or HDMI Scaler that has a selectable output resolutions to 480p or 720p.
Keep in mind when using HDMI that the Component A/V Pass through dose not work.
How ever if want Composite and S-Video inputs you need order the add-on A/V Bracket and Cable Set off there web store which you hook to the A/V header on card.

The Colossus is very popular! It's likely the most popular capture device used for creating PS3 / Xbox360 YouTube videos.

There are two versions, a PVR type unit and one for PCIe.

Another issue is that copy protection that many HDMI devices have. For example the PS3.

However it's very useful on the PC. Because you can put your video card in clone mode, play on the PC and record on the second video output all without some of the issues that FRAPS brings with it.

Yes I know Mau1wurf1977
And PS3 not only device Cable STB are a problem as well thank god Satellite STB work well with no copy protection on HDMI output.