Update on the situation: After a long week, I finally managed to get the firmware and now it works fine. Probably it was because of this that was in the 1.09 firmware update notes. I had 1.07 running on my device.

Has anyone else come across PCIe compatibility problems with the VisionRGB-E1S? I have a new Z690 board that doesn't like it. The card makes POST take about 30 seconds and it is not seen in Windows at all. The UEFI does see a x4 card in the slot tho. Works fine in my Z370 PC.

Ye olde X-Fi Ti works ok on the Z690 in that slot. It's a x16 slot that's actually x4 off the PCH.

There are lots of mystery PCIe settings in the UEFI but I don't know if any of that stuff would help.

swaaye wrote on 2022-03-05, 22:56:

Has anyone else come across PCIe compatibility problems with the VisionRGB-E1S? I have a new Z690 board that doesn't like it. The card makes POST take about 30 seconds and it is not seen in Windows at all. The UEFI does see a x4 card in the slot tho. Works fine in my Z370 PC.

Ye olde X-Fi Ti works ok on the Z690 in that slot. It's a x16 slot that's actually x4 off the PCH.

There are lots of mystery PCIe settings in the UEFI but I don't know if any of that stuff would help.

I use mine in a Z390, which is way older.

Since Windows doesn't see it at all, I would try a a recent Linux live CD to see if lspci sees it . If it doesn't, I would try disabling UEFI or at least secure boot ( does your board even still support CSM) ?

If none of this helps, maybe it's because the PCI-X to PCI Express bridge on the E1S isn't liked by the PCH ? Maybe worth trying in PCI Express slot driven by CPU .

Yeah it seems to work fine in my Z370 system. The Z690 is actually my new TVPC setup and I was thinking of using the Datapath card as a way to get VGA input to the TV. I've instead ordered one of the Extron RGB-DVI convertors to play with. Better than needing to mess with the PC and software to run a VGA retro machine.

I did discover something surprising to me though. According to HWInfo the X-FI Ti is a PCIe 2.0 card. I thought they were PCIe 1.1. I'm sure that helps with compatibility with a modern machine.

I am running Datapath VisionAV capture with the VCS software and I just can't get proper colors. Everything is too dark. For instance in this screenshot the white color is rgb(239, 239, 239) instead of (255, 255, 255) and the blue widow bar is (0, 0, 112) instead of (0, 0, 128). With the original Datapath SW it is the same.

In this case I am running Radeon 8500 and using DVI connection. With VGA it is even worse...

I guess I could calibrate it somehow, but I feel something else is wrong here. Any idea what could be the cause?

Thanks 😀

havli wrote on 2022-03-15, 18:58:

I am running Datapath VisionAV capture with the VCS software and I just can't get proper colors. Everything is too dark. For ins […]
Show full quote

I am running Datapath VisionAV capture with the VCS software and I just can't get proper colors. Everything is too dark. For instance in this screenshot the white color is rgb(239, 239, 239) instead of (255, 255, 255) and the blue widow bar is (0, 0, 112) instead of (0, 0, 128). With the original Datapath SW it is the same.

visionAV_colors.jpg.png

In this case I am running Radeon 8500 and using DVI connection. With VGA it is even worse...

I guess I could calibrate it somehow, but I feel something else is wrong here. Any idea what could be the cause?

Thanks 😀

You should be able to adjust the contrast and brightness globally and per color channel. My VisionRGB-PRO has the same color balance issue, but you can balance it manually and get it perfect enough.

Thank you. It works, now I have calibration for all my resolutions stored in a file and colors look very well.

brad86 wrote on 2021-12-16, 23:03:

I grabbed a used, but mint condition CYP SY-P293 off eBay for £20 and I couldn't be happier with the image.
I just wanted a decent solution for my Dreamcast, without spending crazy money. All the VGA to HDMI cables leave a lot to be desired. The main issue being no control over the pixel clock (DC is 720x480), resulting in incorrect aspect, and vertical lines. This upscaler has every setting I will ever need, and then some.

Paired with a very short £7 Dreamcast VGA cable, and I have got myself a fantastic little solution, for a good price.

You got any more experience there?
Looks like a datapath is basically not affordable anymore. I am seeing the CYP SY-P293 is available for about 50-60€ plus the usual insane shipping and tax costs from the UK. Ofc you would still need a capture card on top of that.
So how is it doing with old PCs? Can it handle 70 frames? How is the color?

I am also still looking for a device to capture S-Video from my C64. And I still got a "spare" elgato 60S lying around. So if anyone knows of any (affordable) option which can do S-Video as well as VGA, let me know.

Kordanor wrote on 2022-03-18, 18:16:

You got any more experience there? Looks like a datapath is basically not affordable anymore. I am seeing the CYP SY-P293 is ava […]
Show full quote

brad86 wrote on 2021-12-16, 23:03:

I grabbed a used, but mint condition CYP SY-P293 off eBay for £20 and I couldn't be happier with the image.
I just wanted a decent solution for my Dreamcast, without spending crazy money. All the VGA to HDMI cables leave a lot to be desired. The main issue being no control over the pixel clock (DC is 720x480), resulting in incorrect aspect, and vertical lines. This upscaler has every setting I will ever need, and then some.

Paired with a very short £7 Dreamcast VGA cable, and I have got myself a fantastic little solution, for a good price.

You got any more experience there?
Looks like a datapath is basically not affordable anymore. I am seeing the CYP SY-P293 is available for about 50-60€ plus the usual insane shipping and tax costs from the UK. Ofc you would still need a capture card on top of that.
So how is it doing with old PCs? Can it handle 70 frames? How is the color?

I am also still looking for a device to capture S-Video from my C64. And I still got a "spare" elgato 60S lying around. So if anyone knows of any (affordable) option which can do S-Video as well as VGA, let me know.

70Hz input works, but 60Hz is output .
Re: VGA Capture Thread

swaaye wrote on 2022-03-05, 22:56:

Has anyone else come across PCIe compatibility problems with the VisionRGB-E1S? I have a new Z690 board that doesn't like it. The card makes POST take about 30 seconds and it is not seen in Windows at all. The UEFI does see a x4 card in the slot tho. Works fine in my Z370 PC.

Ye olde X-Fi Ti works ok on the Z690 in that slot. It's a x16 slot that's actually x4 off the PCH.

There are lots of mystery PCIe settings in the UEFI but I don't know if any of that stuff would help.

Just did an upgrade to the z690 platform and found out that mijn E1S card was not working in the x4 slot on my MSI MAG Z690 Tomahawk WiFi DDR4 motherboard, luckily the system was booting fine.
The stange thing is the card is working in the bottom x1 slot
Hope someone is finding a fix for this 🙁

Z690 is supposed to support pci-e 4.0 on chipset-connected slots, right? Is it possible to force them to run at older standard? Also, do you have some other pci-e 1.0 device to try?

The most modern platform I tried my E1s was Ryzen 3700X + B350 board. I had one of the boards that could connect the x4 slot directly to the CPU (but limited to 3.0 because of the old board). Everything worked perfectly fine in that PC.

idk about Z690 but in a lot of BIOS setups you can set legacy modes for PCIe, might be worth a try.

The VisionRGB-E1S works on my B550 at least.

On my z690 board zero setting for chipset pcie settings, only for cpu pcie slots 🙁

I'll be looking to capture footage from PowerVR M3D and Nvidia NV1 games at some point in the future. Would a solution like this have merit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtvFtoIXaDc

I should add that I'm running the games on Pentium4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition via Windows 98SE, I'm not sure if the few Win98SE capture apps might be a better option, given P4 is pretty quick? There's some discussion of things like HyperCam and CamStudio (and more) over here: https://msfn.org/board/topic/178494-video-cap … for-windows-98/ but again, would it be better to do VGA capture route instead?

Be warned those affordable sticks are MJPEG at fastest and will eat at the dither, unless you use YUV2 and then it'll be slow (which may or may not be fine depending if you get 30fps at best in a game anyway). There's also horizontal sharpening you can't disable. Don't bother piping sound through them as it' s mono

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-03-29, 15:50:

I'll be looking to capture footage from PowerVR M3D and Nvidia NV1 games at some point in the future. Would a solution like this have merit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtvFtoIXaDc

I should add that I'm running the games on Pentium4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition via Windows 98SE, I'm not sure if the few Win98SE capture apps might be a better option, given P4 is pretty quick? There's some discussion of things like HyperCam and CamStudio (and more) over here: https://msfn.org/board/topic/178494-video-cap … for-windows-98/ but again, would it be better to do VGA capture route instead?

If you limit yourself to 640x480, you "might" get away with capturing directly on the machine being used but, even then, either gameplay performance, or capture is likely to be affected unacceptably .

Also, Windows 98 SE has a 4GB file size limit due to FAT32, so any capture application would either need to be able to split capture to multiple files, have you record very short segments or record highly compressed video.

The latter would imply using either a high compression setting (lower quality). Most newer and higher quality compression codecs would likely be out of the question for a Pentium 4 .

In other words, I recommend using a newer machine for video capture purposes in conjunction with a VGA capture card .

P.S. "Pretty quick" and "Pentium 4" used in the same sentence made me smile . No offence meant. For standard definition video capture using a software only real-time compression codec, a Pentium 4 was fine, but I wouldn't want to try to do that while the PC was busy doing something else as well .

Yeah I did a test and it wasn't pretty 😁 even capturing a D3D game in WinXP on that machine wasn't very pleasant. I'm guessing that to get a decent recording I might need to spend a bit more than I'd like; are there any budget VGA options that will allow a decent capture from games that are no higher than 800x600 res?

Regarding the PCI-E compatibility. I can confirm now that VisionRGB-E2S works fine on ASRock B450 Pro4 + Ryzen 9 5900X. Well, at least one channel does, So far I had no time to test the other one... but the PCI-E -> PCI-X bridge definitely works.

One important question: capturing from the Nvidia NV1; when you run a game fullscreen on that, it runs at 640x400 resolution (I believe). When I've viewed that on LCD screens via VGA, the image stretches off the top and bottom of the screen, and can't be shrunk vertically.

Whichever capture route I went for, would it do the same (if capturing via VGA) or would the whole image be visible? A dirty workaround would be to capture the game in a window, then crop out the window, but that's not ideal...