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.