Just discovered this project a few days ago and got a few questions.

Personally I am using a Voodoo 3 3500 AGP as primary video card. From what I read AGP will not work, and Voodoo 3 will not work either (though I guess not this special VGA 3500 was tested, but I doubt it makes a difference).
However I got a "backup" PCI Card, which happens to be the compatible: The Trio64V2/DX. And I would only need to use this CRT Terminator card for 320x200 games anyways, to get rid of the grain, which is only present in doublescan apparently and can't get removed by the retrotink4k. So I could make this a dedicated card for that using the Terminator.

But as I do have a Retrotink4k for scaling anyways, the whole scaling feature would not be required. Therefore I am wondering if there are any plans for a "light" version without the whole processing logic.
I don't know ofc how much of the processing (and production) cost is used for that and if it would make an actual difference.

The ISA part is I guess required to correctly interprete the Data from the feature connector (via the snoop). Is there any way you could get the data by other means? I was wondering with such an expensive device (300€+ if everything is included) could be made external so it could be used for multiple PCs. But if you require an ISA connection, that would be kinda hard (possibly with a long ISA Extention cable, but don't know if thats viable).

Hi Kordanor,

AGP will unfortunately not work. For some reason (probably standardized somewhere, but we haven't been able to find out where such a standard doc would exist), all AGP cards we have ever tried (some 15-20 different ones) only have the pass-through connector as video in to the card, rather than video out from the card. No mention about any AGP card having e.g. option to toggle the direction. So quite likely something changed when going from PCI -> AGP, and the video out was dropped as redundant (after all, AGP cards started to have DVI-D eventually)

CRT Terminator will definitely get rid of analog noise. Though such noise will exist in both doublescan and singlescan.. it sounds a bit surprising if singlescan VGA output would be free from noise.

As for CRT Terminator SKUs, the current card is quite likely the only SKU we will have for the PC. We try to keep it in stock as long as there is interest. The most recent investigation we've had has been with other retro systems in mind, but those have been just tinkering, rather than thinking about a product of any kind.

clb wrote on 2026-01-25, 21:38:

Hi Kordanor, […]
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Hi Kordanor,

AGP will unfortunately not work. For some reason (probably standardized somewhere, but we haven't been able to find out where such a standard doc would exist), all AGP cards we have ever tried (some 15-20 different ones) only have the pass-through connector as video in to the card, rather than video out from the card. No mention about any AGP card having e.g. option to toggle the direction. So quite likely something changed when going from PCI -> AGP, and the video out was dropped as redundant (after all, AGP cards started to have DVI-D eventually)

CRT Terminator will definitely get rid of analog noise. Though such noise will exist in both doublescan and singlescan.. it sounds a bit surprising if singlescan VGA output would be free from noise.

As for CRT Terminator SKUs, the current card is quite likely the only SKU we will have for the PC. We try to keep it in stock as long as there is interest. The most recent investigation we've had has been with other retro systems in mind, but those have been just tinkering, rather than thinking about a product of any kind.

Thanks for the reply!
Will keep considering it then.
The price is a bit steep to be really a no-brainer purchase for me.
The issue with 320x200 with anologue noise is very noticable, especially on codecs which magnify any grain. In particular with big darker spaces. Like the brown background in the inventory of Might and magic 3, the brown text box background in Lands of Lore or Eye of the Beholder, the grey interface in Dungeon Master 2 or just the grey/brown walls. And that is indepdenent of capturing tool and graphics card. And while present on other low resolutions, for 640x480 and upward this is not visible. This is something I am looking to find a good resolution for a year now, but there isn't one. For now I still use vcs as external tool to filter pixelgrain and then record the window of vcs. Which ofc really isn't optimal.
Here is an example Video I made a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6q_MzYP02g
But its even more apparent in games with darker brownish backgrounds. So I also quickly recorded a snippet from Lands of Lore, where the brown text background looks particularly bad: https://youtu.be/35b0a7ZcxnU
I would hope with this crt terminator the grain would not exist in the first place.

Thanks, good video, that illustrates the issue well. I replied to the other video capture thread at Re: VGA Capture Thread about this, given that topic was discussed there.

CRT Terminator definitely does not have this grain. You can download an OBS test recording at https://oummg.com/manual/commander_keen_foray … 00_70.362hz.mkv (linked in the manual at https://oummg.com/manual/index.html#obs_video_capture ) to see how it looks like. This is a frame-lossless capture of the DOS 320x200 framebuffer (footage recording frame rate matches the DOS input VGA frame rate 70.362Hz), aspect-corrected from 320x200 up to 1600x1200.

Note though that one needs a proper rgb format HDMI video capture box. The cheap Amazon/AliExpress boxes all do Motion JPEG compression, which results in compression artifacts already in the HDMI->USB bridge.

To view such a 70.362 Hz video in e.g. VLC Player, it is best to have a high refresh rate gaming display, like 240Hz or 360Hz. This way the video player can manage frame pacing with the 70Hz footage to e.g. 360Hz display to minimize stuttering.

Here is the same video as above uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR_v5XbwRb8 , to see what kind of output YouTube makes when one uploads that .mkv video to it. (in particular, it decimates 70.362Hz down to 60Hz, introducing some stutter)

Thank you! Yeah, that seems to be very clean from what I can tell.

Kordanor wrote on 2026-01-25, 22:42:

The issue with 320x200 with anologue noise is very noticable, especially on codecs which magnify any grain. In particular with big darker spaces. Like the brown background in the inventory of Might and magic 3, the brown text box background in Lands of Lore or Eye of the Beholder, the grey interface in Dungeon Master 2 or just the grey/brown walls. And that is indepdenent of capturing tool and graphics card. And while present on other low resolutions, for 640x480 and upward this is not visible. This is something I am looking to find a good resolution for a year now, but there isn't one. For now I still use vcs as external tool to filter pixelgrain and then record the window of vcs. Which ofc really isn't optimal.

Something to keep in mind is that (with very few exceptions) old 8-bit paletted vga games were limited to 6 bits each for R, G and B. So if you quantize your captures before compressing to remove the unused lower bits it effectively works as noise reduction.

Hi, I don't see the S3 868 as a tested chip on the list. I have this chip on a Diamond Stealth 64 board. I'm not looking for a guarantee (and I see the generous return policy), just wondering if it's worthwhile to give it a go with a brand new card.

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/diam … -vision-868-vlb

My other option to get digital video output was to try a RetroTINK-4K which is more oriented around console gaming, but I didn't like all of the manual mode switching that Phil highlighted in his video on it. Even with the mode switch with CRT Terminator that still feels like a better tradeoff than having to program each mode and grab the remote to switch them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix5Zd5_JZOc

rjbrown99 wrote on 2026-06-30, 05:21:

My other option to get digital video output was to try a RetroTINK-4K

That's not going to get you "digital output" in the same sense that a CRT Terminator would, the retrotink would basically be acting as a glorified VGA2HDMI adapter (which you can buy for $5...)

rjbrown99 wrote on 2026-06-30, 05:21:

Hi, I don't see the S3 868 as a tested chip on the list. I have this chip on a Diamond Stealth 64 board. I'm not looking for a g […]
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Hi, I don't see the S3 868 as a tested chip on the list. I have this chip on a Diamond Stealth 64 board. I'm not looking for a guarantee (and I see the generous return policy), just wondering if it's worthwhile to give it a go with a brand new card.

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/diam … -vision-868-vlb

My other option to get digital video output was to try a RetroTINK-4K which is more oriented around console gaming, but I didn't like all of the manual mode switching that Phil highlighted in his video on it. Even with the mode switch with CRT Terminator that still feels like a better tradeoff than having to program each mode and grab the remote to switch them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix5Zd5_JZOc

As Jmarsh already mentioned, the Retrotink 4K is not doing the same. I am personally using a Retrotink 4k and I am still considering buying a CRT Terminator. Why? I stated this in a previous post: There is some serious grain in the VGA signal. Which seems to be very likely related to what Jmarsh just mentioned before: "Something to keep in mind is that (with very few exceptions) old 8-bit paletted vga games were limited to 6 bits each for R, G and B. "
However it is impossible to adjust this. The tink4k does have a bitcrush, and also options to boost colors and such, but all you do is basically move the issue around. Potentially it would even be "unstable" as in a heated up graphics card might have a shift in colors, resulting in being out of calibration with the tink for this fine tuning. Either way, right now it seems to be impossible to get a 100% clean picture on the PC for anything below SVGA (see my post and examples above).
You will hardly notice that on normal output however, and once you use CRT filters it would be impossible to detect. But since I am recording a clean signal and there is a youtube compression which magnifies any issue, it becomes very visible. I further was able to reduce the issue by oversampling. You would usually decimate the sampling rate so that you end up with 320x200 pixels. But the grain gets "better" if you don't decimate it and keep it at 640x400 (basically every original pixel is sampled twice but differently, an inconsistency can then only affect a quarter of a pixel) and then scale it with half integers. So instead of using x4 and x5 for 1280x1000 I use x2 and x2.5.
Rigtht now I am not aware of any OBS filter being able to make a clean picture out of that. There is a slight chance that mike chi, in his current spree of pushing out firmware updates every other day might find a solution to that. But the current status is that it's impossible to do with the tink and neither PC Graphics, nor clean signals seem to have a high priority / too many users in the Retrotink4k target group (most people use it on consoles and use it together with CRT filters).
So as of today the Terminator seems to be the only solution.

rjbrown99 wrote on 2026-06-30, 05:21:

Hi, I don't see the S3 868 as a tested chip on the list. I have this chip on a Diamond Stealth 64 board. I'm not looking for a guarantee (and I see the generous return policy), just wondering if it's worthwhile to give it a go with a brand new card.

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/diam … -vision-868-vlb

The S3 Vision 864 on PCI was the closest that was tested. https://oummg.com/manual/adapters.html#s3 . Do note that this card had some bugs that are listed on the test chart. So it may be possible that the S3 Vision 868 might exhibit the same compatibility issues.

With a very high likelihood all the standard VGA video modes will work like on any other card.

S3 did in some video cards have a custom utility/register to enable the Feature Connector bus, and by default it was disabled. So check the graphics card driver disk if you can find any mention for a utility to enable the Feature Connector. If no such utility exists, then it is likely that it is always on.

Some VLB cards/motherboards do have the drawback that enabling the palette snoop option (to get correct palette colors) may need configuring. This is sometimes done with a VGA card driver utility, and sometimes the PC motherboard BIOS also has a setting to enable palette snoop. As a last resort fallback, you can use a TSR from https://github.com/juj/crt_terminator/tree/main/DOS.

What is generally more tricky are the SVGA and VESA modes, for which every vendor had very custom video mode timings for, especially around the front and back porch timings and the border area. CRT Terminator has a built-in VGA and SVGA video mode database that it recognizes, but if there are very custom video modes, then the border removal might not work for them (in which case CRT Terminator should display those video modes with the VGA borders intact)

rjbrown99 wrote on 2026-06-30, 05:21:

My other option to get digital video output was to try a RetroTINK-4K which is more oriented around console gaming, but I didn't like all of the manual mode switching that Phil highlighted in his video on it. Even with the mode switch with CRT Terminator that still feels like a better tradeoff than having to program each mode and grab the remote to switch them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix5Zd5_JZOc

RetroTINK-4K has a very strong FPGA in it, so it can do all kinds of CRT filters and of course the 4K upscaling, if that's something you're after. Apart from that, CRT Terminator does have the benefit that it receives the source digital signal, as opposed to RetroTINK-4K having to convert the analog VGA signal back to digital.

I recognize the difference between the two devices and approaches and I'd much prefer to have a pure digital output. But the actual end result is the same in that it achieves my goal of plugging in a legacy VGA connector into a modern HDMI/digital monitor. I do think that any output from a cheap VGA2HDMI through to the Retrotink are going to be both a tad degraded and also quirky when changing video modes. It's not so much upscaling that I am after, just a high quality output from the original device in a range of different modes, both DOS gaming and general purpose OS usage of things like Windows 95/98/etc.

I'm in the market for an ARK ARK1000VL which I read in an earlier thread works pretty well with the CRT Terminator. Perhaps I'll pick up a CRT Terminator, test it with this S3 (and report back here), and if it has major issues just put it aside until I find the ARK.

It's totally possible to create a VGA to HDMI converter that actually works instead of providing a degraded and unacceptable experience that is only suitable for industrial equipment displays, but no one has even tried to do it yet. All the FPGA devices are made by console people with consoles in mind, and VGA is such an afterthought that it inevitably has several showstopping issues.

CRT Terminator is great but has limitations and is only the perfect device for capturing 320x200 games.