Wish I could edit to add: "no video" in the sense that you can't _capture_ video. But you can watch video, of course. You can even watch video in MSPaint by painting the key (pink) into the image where you want to poke-through to see the video. It's very fun.

Unplug the VESA feature connector, and the monitor goes dark, loses sync.

Unplug the VGA passthrough, and all you see is the video that was key-painted into a black void. The card paints the video and uses the VESA feature connector to figure out where to paint it (what on-screen is the right color); software also tells the card what X/Y and width/height to draw the box. All 3 - software (ISA), palette/video memory (VESA), and video itself (VGA) are needed to work together.

Great! I'll use PAL but that should work too.

Can this card do genlock without any driver, like your pink-in-paint example?

About video capture: I don't know if this era of pc was up to the task. They can hardly play back full screen video... My setup was used to overlay computer graphics on video live.

My PC was used a.o. in a high school to assist in lab lessons (and quite advanced, apparently, as it has computer graphics overlay sequencing software), but of course we'll use it for its true power: recreating REO Speedwagon video clips. We'll make millions. MILLIONS!

Who is the manufacturer of this "Video II software" and does it have a direct relation to this model capture card? I don't think I've seen anything like Video II on my W95 software suite for this card. Mine seems to be leveraging the U-Lead PC Video driver.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2026-03-03, 15:11:

Who is the manufacturer of this "Video II software" and does it have a direct relation to this model capture card? I don't think I've seen anything like Video II on my W95 software suite for this card. Mine seems to be leveraging the U-Lead PC Video driver.

I found this thread by scouring for software for this thing, and the best lead so far was this reply earlier in the thread: Re: Building a 486 PC - hold my hand!

Yours is an even more golden standard, I think... really hoping to see that one 😀

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2026-03-03, 09:12:

Great! I'll use PAL but that should work too.

Can this card do genlock without any driver, like your pink-in-paint example?

No, the software needs to set up the parameters (thus the first part of the "3 things" - Software / ISA). Without software telling the card what to do, the card is inert. Software talks to the video controller and tells it what input to use, what clocking/video parameters, and then it sets up output circuitry to do its thing. I think VESA memory map "punches holes" in the VGA signal that flow-through to separate video-syncing circuitry. But only once it's all enabled.

A bit different from genlock - since it's completely transforming the signal (composite input to VGA output).

Thanks, together we get to fully understand these nice cards and get them running.

Interesting that you could use that VideoII driver for this card as, to my understanding, that driver is (also) for significantly more recent TV cards. Seems like the company liked what they had.

How did you run your MS Paint experiment if your driver is for DOS? And do you know for which Windows version the non-DOS part of that VideoII driver download is meant?

The driver is both DOS & Windows 3.1 😀

The "Video II" application is the only app installed when you run the installer for Windows (3.1).

When you run the Video II app, it bypasses VFW completely and just directly configures the card. Maximize the window (or use its "full screen" which even paints a little 4-pixel square bezel), it configures the card to blast nearly the full screen. The software just draws the canvas as pink, but once the capture card starts, it replaces pink with the video. So I put MSPaint over the window, and can draw video in pink 😉

Today I experimented with Video for Windows (1.1e) and the VFW capture driver. I got a terrible video capture (160x120 at ~15 FPS). The card has no sound of its own, so I piped audio into my Ensoniq Vivo 90, which ... is a Windows 95-era card with very limited Win3.x support. Couldn't control the audio volume, got ear-blasted recording (despite piping it through to speakers just fine).

Moved over to Windows 95, installed the Win3.1 VFW driver, and it was ... distorted (doesn't paint the overlay into the right place, possibly due to running at 800x600 resolution), but it captures audio well. Encountered more issues with the system (disk I/O hangs, possibly format-related as I've got a stack of weirdness on here including a VL-Bus IDE card), gave up for now.

Will come back to it this evening, but hopefully I get a good capture soon.

For now, here's the first capture (originally 128MB of uncompressed frames... ffmpeg'd it down to h264). Warning: audio has been reduced by 90% but it'll still jumpscare you.

(Forum doesn't accept *.mp4 so I had to pack it in a 7z)

Oooh 3.11, interesting! I want this pc to be W3.11 to give it the right vibe in my row of retro pc's.

That said, when time comes I will dump the W95 software for you and I might test the W95 install before going to 3.11.

If I want to use a "new" 4GB hard drive for this 486 with a 1992 Amibios, how do I make it work? The current 1.2GB hard drive uses OnTrack to make the BIOS happy about its ginormous size. So, what is the best choice of honey-I-shrunk-the-HDD software these days?

I use Ontrack Disk Manager for all my vintage shenanigans. It works by loading an INT13h handler to overwrite the BIOS tables, as long as the system stays in INT13 mode. That is, once Windows 95 takes direct control of the HDD controller, all bets are off. The INT13h handler intercepts calls to overwrite the boot sector (MBR) and keeps itself intact. I've been bitten by loading a VL-Bus IDE controller driver in DOS before installing Windows 95, which allowed Windows to overwrote the MBR. Very few things overwrite the boot sector though - Windows Setup in particular, and FDISK. So it's generally safe to use.

With Ontrack, since it rewrites the CHS handler that the BIOS set up, it lets me move drives between systems without CHS translation issues. As long as the system is able to load sector 0, it can boot the system. No CHS translation drama. (Much more back-story can be said about the jungle of CHS / LBA translations...)

I use an 80GB hard drive on both an older 386 system, then slapped right into the 486, and now running in my Pentium Pro system as I work more with this capture card. Ontrack is awesome. 😀

Ok I'll try ontrack on the new drive as well then.