I'd like to see those cards tried on 486s. They obviously lack CPU to decode 480P MPEG2 on the fly, so a decoder card could benefit them

I was skeptical of DVD in its early days. Seemed like too much hype to bother. Stuck with VHS until 2004 😜

I yanked this card from a dead machine that a friend got from his workplace.

Research so far has pointed to it being a DVD decoder card, but I can't even figure out what brand it is so I can't try it out. Hell, I don't even know how it works since my first DVD capable machine was a P2-450 that could do the decoding on its own.

It seems like a weird one anyway. Doesn't have a VGA passthrough or anything. The outputs are composite, S-VHS, SPDIF, and AC3.

Doesn't have a VGA passthrough or anything.

Yes it does, actually... notice the pinheaders at the top left corner of the board, that say VGA IN and VGA OUT. It can probably also be attached via the VESA feature connector. And it should also be able to run without any sort of VGA hookup to it, provided that you're just going to be outputting to a TV and not a computer monitor.

It's a Procomp M410, BTW. It is indeed rather obscure, and you may be outta luck on finding the original drivers and software for it, but the generic WDM drivers for the LuxSonor chipset should probably work with it... it appears the file you need is WDM220.zip, available here. It's also Win95/98 only, as far as I can tell... looks like support got dropped before Win2K even came around.

I never quite understood why these things have composite jacks on them.

Anyway, if you want to test them, Geexbox should do the trick. As I recall, it supports a bunch of different decoder cards, and there's no fancy extra configuration required. And for practical purposes, on such old machines, it's a good idea to cut out all the overhead of a full OS if you just want to watch a movie.
http://www.geexbox.org/

EDIT: Oops, the DXR2 is the one that Geexbox doesn't support.

I've still got a Creative DXR3 kicking around somewhere in my spares box. I remember that the output using overlay on my monitor scaled to the native res of the screen (I could have used the TV out - but I only had a 14" portable tv at the time!) was really very nice compared to software decoding on my P3-450.

There's still active development on the Linux DXR(x) driver - I haven't followed it in years, but they got the hardware to do a hell of a lot more than originally intended.

I have a Creative DXR2 running in one of my retro rigs. It works in Win9x and NT4 (though currently I have no IRQ left for it in NT4).
It accelerates also usual MPEG2 Video streams.
The DXR2 has also some flaws though...

According to ATI DVD Playback, I tried to get a ATI DVD Player running on a Rage II or Pro (with H/W acceleration).
I couldn't find the software anymore. You need basically an image of the special add-on DVD Player CD specific to the card and the correct driver...
Still if anyone got a working config of old ATI card, correct driver, correct OS, ATI DVD Player with working hardware acceleration, please give a brief overview.

Yeah I remember the ATI DVD Player. NVIDIA and Matrox had similar proprietary players. Well they were actually rebranded licensed players. Matrox's was just a software player because G400 didn't support most of the MPEG2 decoding process. 3dfx and Matrox didn't implement IDCT or motion compensation (or both) and those were the things that hit the CPU hard.

I do remember that the early software DVD players did not exactly provide reference quality output. I wonder if that was improved upon eventually or if it was a result of approximating math to make the decoding process possible on a PII.

There was also a strange line of products called the MPACT and MPACT2 by Chromatic Research. They are semi-general purpose VLIW / SIMD processors that can do a number of things including modem, 3D, 2D, MPEG2, sound, etc. I once played with one of these cards (back in '99 I think) and it was pretty bad for 3D. I remember trying 3DMark99 on it. But the concept was interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_Research

elianda wrote:

I couldn't find the software anymore. You need basically an image of the special add-on DVD Player CD specific to the card and the correct driver...
Still if anyone got a working config of old ATI card, correct driver, correct OS, ATI DVD Player with working hardware acceleration, please give a brief overview.

It's easier than you think. The only thing the setup program looks for is a copy of DVD.DLL in the root directory of the CD, with a version number (i.e. the one you can read in the Details tab of the DLL's Properties dialog in Explorer) corresponding to the model number on the CD. The relevant figures are human-readable in one of the installer's setup files (SETUP.INS, I think). For instance, I use a CD with a copy of DVD.DLL, version 6.2.0.13, which works with model number 180-G01081-100 . Isolated copies of DVD.DLL are easy enough to find; you might even be able to use any old hacked DLL as long as it reports the right version number.

Failing that, I think Enabler might work too, but i can't quite recall.

It doesn't really matter anyway, as ATI's DVD player isn't the only thing that can use ATI's DVD acceleration; I'm pretty sure Cyberlink PowerDVD works just as well, and I think Geexbox can do it too.

This sounds like an interesting sub-project to add to my "World's Fastest 486" project super list (I suppose a critic, i.e. my wife, may prefer to call the project, "The World's Slowest 586."

Anyway, I have long been curious if a PCI-based DVD decoder card, or module would be able to play DVD's in a 486. Anyone have any past or present success with this?

The Matrox G200, PCI, 16MB SDRAM graphics card works great in the 486. There are add-on pins for a DVD Decoder module with drivers that work in Windows95/98 (according to the Matrox website). Has anyone had any luck with this, or even seen one of these modules?

"The World's Slowest 586."

I think I may already have that dubious honour:

My recent entry into an underclocking competition 😀
Part of the requirements was a CPU-Z validated speed, unfortunately it appears to have some arbitrary lower limit so it wouldn't accept my validation. It did accept an 8MHz result though: http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php

As for DVD's on a 486, can't say I ever tried it. I did try an MPEG video file on a DX2-66 using a DOS media player, and it was abysmal, even on a postage stamp sized window.

umm... screenshot fail?

my friend was stupid/crazy enough to buy the DXR2 kit new when it came out in 98... I wasn't too impressed with it considering I had a 2nd gen standalone DVD player that worked way better... well I now have his DXR2 drive living in my K6-3 box... I don't have the decoder card though and I don't really care for it... windvd/powerdvd works good enough on that system (I think)

creative kept selling DVD kits up to DXR5 I think... silly upgrades like this while computer prices were dropping like a rock in the late 90s is no surprise why creative lost so much money on multimedia kits... nobody cared to upgrade their old systems anymore when it was easier to buy a whole new honkin' compaq presario from the computer store 😉

umm... screenshot fail?

I don't think you understand just how slow a 4MHz system runs in Windows.

It took 2 hours for CPU-Z to launch, I wasn't going to battle it any longer to try and open mspaint for a screnshot 😉

DonutKing wrote:

I think I may already have that dubious honour: […]
Show full quote

"The World's Slowest 586."

I think I may already have that dubious honour:

My recent entry into an underclocking competition 😀
Part of the requirements was a CPU-Z validated speed, unfortunately it appears to have some arbitrary lower limit so it wouldn't accept my validation. It did accept an 8MHz result though: http://valid.canardpc.com/records.php

Nice hehe 😉

And I don't see how this is a screenshot fail either, looks fine to me (which was it's intended purpose in this thread).

My friend and I split the cost for a DXR2 back in 98 or 99. IIRC the card worked perfectly ok in his p200-mmx. I was more lucky, I had a p2-233 overclocked to 300 on a bx6 board and that one almost played dvds in software on a good day 😀

I never quite understood why these things have composite jacks on them.

The TV out part of these cards was actually very good. Much better than the TV out of the graphics card (it was because the video was played in native resolution with correct interlacing - the output could easily compare to a standalone dvd player). Why buy 2 devices (decoder board and a standalone player) when you could just buy a cable and hook the decoder board to the tv? 😀

I have a sigma Hollywood Plus card, loved it back in the day for TV-out was great looking! At the time it was used on a K6-2 system. Its in a box now 🙁

http://www.digivision.it/docs/hollywoodplus.html

How did this card compare versus the newer DXR5 and such? For me it just worked well enough. And it was free to me so I didn't care!

I still have my Encore 5x kit, with the DXR2 and a 5X DVD drive. I remember that back then it was great to have one of this kits. I believe Space Jam DVD came bundled.

Wing Commander IV DVD Special Edition...
more movie than game!
more movie than movies for that matter. 😁

sprcorreia wrote:

I still have my Encore 5x kit, with the DXR2 and a 5X DVD drive. I remember that back then it was great to have one of this kits. I believe Space Jam DVD came bundled.

And you did NOT go into a killing rampage?

swaaye wrote:

So who on here blew money on one of them? 😁 I remember running into some people with the Creative DXR cards. Of course Pentium IIs became capable of playing DVDs on their own pretty quick once PowerDVD/WinDVD got nice and optimized.

I had my first DVD drive, a Toshiba 6X, up until a couple of years ago.

Hey maybe I should put together a PII and see how slow I can go until it can't play a DVD. Does that sound exciting? 😉 Can a PII keep up with a K6-2 in this case?!?! Maybe I could even explore the thrilling early attempts at DXVA in NV/ATI/etc cards!!!! Actually that would probably entail digging up proprietary DVD software (because they each had their own back then) and that sounds anti-fun.

When I was still using a 486 I got the kit from Creative with the DVD player and the decoder card. A 486 without a decoder card is useless for watching movies.