How odd, though I don't have any Magewell PCIe cards, the drivers have compiled fine all the way up to the most recent 6.5 kernels a lot of distros ship with. Vastly different story to my Datapath card, which I literally have to use OpenSuSE Leap 15 with Kernel 5.14.3 to even compile the driver on.

I probably need to take a look at their most recent release then. I do recall when I got the card a couple of years ago the documentation said it was for 5.x.

Having written a few devices drivers for the kernel before I know how often the interfaces change between major versions; 2 to 3 and then 3 to 4 were huge changes for example.

If they still build against 6.x then that's promising that the card still has a decent amount of life left in it. I don't tend to keep this system at the bleeding edge as it's my main work/storage system.

That's for Magewell though. Datapath you can forget about. I'll look at compiling the driver on a laptop I have with OpenSuSE Tumbleweed to make sure tomorrow.

Gave it a shot on my laptop with RegataOS 24 (OpenSuSE Tumbleweed) running Kernel 6.8.2, and the Magewell driver did fail, but most likely another change since 6.5 is my guess. The most recent driver is from just over a year ago (3/10/2023), but the changelog mentions Kernel 6.1 and 6.2 in it. I'll l0ad up Ubuntu 23.10 as a live distro later, and test there (since it ships with 6.5).

[Edit]
I forgot to mention that if you send Magewell's support team the compilation logs, they tend to work out the error pretty quickly for a driver update. I'll reply/edit once I test on Mantic to see if 6.5 changed something.

[Edit 2]
Ok, so it does not compile on 6.5.0 in Mantic Minotaur (23.10). The current LTS (23.04 Lunar Lobster) does ship with Kernel 6.2. So that version ought to work.

Hi, I've been searching for a while for a way to 100% be able to capture DOS games in DOS mode, and I watched the video about the retrotink 4K and it seems like it works amazing. I don't care that much about the 4K but will need to make videos in 1080p somehow. The price tag, though... $750 is a bit much. I have read through this thread a bit in the past and there's just a lot of information. Is there anything cheaper that's 100% known to work, with hardware that I can easily find for sale (or have a link to buy)? I would prefer if it worked off of VGA and I can't install anything on my laptop, and not that confident on installing things on my old DOS / windows 952e PC.

Kitty Trouble wrote on Yesterday, 07:15:

Hi, I've been searching for a while for a way to 100% be able to capture DOS games in DOS mode, and I watched the video about the retrotink 4K and it seems like it works amazing. I don't care that much about the 4K but will need to make videos in 1080p somehow. The price tag, though... $750 is a bit much. I have read through this thread a bit in the past and there's just a lot of information. Is there anything cheaper that's 100% known to work, with hardware that I can easily find for sale (or have a link to buy)? I would prefer if it worked off of VGA and I can't install anything on my laptop, and not that confident on installing things on my old DOS / windows 952e PC.

There are no better alternatives. There is the Datapath Vision RGB, which you can buy used for around 100€, but new its also around 1000€. This program has no "official" drivers, and fan drivers have some issues unless you use linux, which are still being developed inofficially. Great captures, but definitely not hassle free, and can be problematic especially if you need to switch resolutions or graphics cards a lot.

Cheaper options will usually come with issues or less quality, if you consider capturing 320x200 70Hz DOS.

I am in the same boat. I don't need the 4k stuff. I don't need the filters and scalers. But I don't think, that even for 1080p there is any better alternative.