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.

OK, I'm continuing with this project. I've replaced the BIOS battery and now I'm building up the PC again.

Good news for the collector: it is a genuine DX50 processor, not an overclocked DX40!

The connector card has an IDE 1 and IDE 2 slot. Would it support 2 optical drives on IDE 2? (IDE 1 has the HDD). Or should I limit it to 1 drive per slot. It has an older BIOS and looking at the provided cables it seems to have assumed 1 item per IDE slot.

Which is OK in a way, it doesn't allow me to fully load the front panel as I like to do with my builds, but it does free up a CD ROM for my test rig.

Going on with 1 CD rom for the time being, and an external ZIP drive.

Before I'll do a clean install of this PC, I'd first like to experiment with the more-than-genlock card in this beauty. So I'll read back up on it, modify a VGA cable if I have a proper donor, and see how far I get.

FalconFour wrote on 2026-03-03, 06:39:

For the VGA passthrough, the card needs a dongle (loops back to VGA card output, goes into the card with tee-off for one or more RCA jacks as "inputs"). I simply used a VGA cable and broke-off pins 4 and 5, as they were grounding the RCA composite video signal (they re-used grounds as signals). VGA cables are a dime a dozen; cards like this are not. Then, the composite jack on the card (supposed to be "output"/passthru) serves as an input.

So:

-The vga cable from the capture card to the monitor is a regular one

-the vga cable between the graphics card and capture card needs to have pin 4 and 5 removed at capture card side.

Correct?

I went ahead and did it that way. Findings.

1) I still have image on the monitor, so at least passthrough works. I notice on this LCD that the image does become slightly less sharp, which does not surprise me. I think that on a CRT it would be less noticable. Also, the VGA cable I ruined for this experiment does not appear to be anything near high end.

2) Now in the iPhoto Plus video panel I see -with nothing connected to the coax input- a very dark image with faint static. Like black with reddish static. Which is a lot better than the simple error I used to get before.

3) When I make a capture in iPhoto Plus, it captures. The captured image looks weird, like confetti with horizontal bands. I'm quite sure this is because lacking an input on coax means lacking a sync signal.

Anyway, this is a huge step forward and time to steal our DVD player for some serious tests! But not tonight.

Also, there is a program Mediamate on this PC that allows you to make scripts to show video, overlay text etc. I've been able to run scripts. Doesn't show the video signal on it yet, but given that there *is* no video signal connected, no conclusions there.

Connected a Playstation 2 to the capture card. I can see the PS2 in the video viewer, so that works fine. Only when I capture it in iPhoto Plus, I again have digital confettis instead of the image I saw. No idea if it's a setting somewhere or what (it's iPhoto, for all I know it might be trying to capture the parallel port. 😁).

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 14:58:

OK, I'm continuing with this project. I've replaced the BIOS battery and now I'm building up the PC again. […]
Show full quote

OK, I'm continuing with this project. I've replaced the BIOS battery and now I'm building up the PC again.

Good news for the collector: it is a genuine DX50 processor, not an overclocked DX40!

The connector card has an IDE 1 and IDE 2 slot. Would it support 2 optical drives on IDE 2? (IDE 1 has the HDD). Or should I limit it to 1 drive per slot. It has an older BIOS and looking at the provided cables it seems to have assumed 1 item per IDE slot.

Which is OK in a way, it doesn't allow me to fully load the front panel as I like to do with my builds, but it does free up a CD ROM for my test rig.

VL bus IDE adapters usually had two connectors, primary and secondary.

Older BIOSes, on the other hand, sometimes just had entries for the primary channel’s master and slave.

Since 486 bioses don’t know what a cdrom is anyway, running them on secondary is probably the best move.

However, I struggle to understand what the purpose of two optical drives in a 486 system would be.

2 CD ROm drives? Visual impact, nothing more. Rather pointless indeed. Might be better to go for a big floppy drive, if I stumble accross one.

Anyway, one wrong click and iPhoto no longer shows the video image in its video window. It's somewhere halfway in a driver installation. No biggie, I've seen the card able to read the video signal and pass through the gpu signal. So safe to assume it works. And I've got an image of the HDD which I can restore. But now, I'm turning the PC into the gaming station I wanted it to be (and getting rid of that horrible restricted W95 install that was on there): different HDD in it, and installing a full W95. I was in doubt between W95 and W3.11 because I already have a W98 PC. But I just so happen to have a W95 installation set and not a W3.11 one, so... let's see what this gives.

Good news: the booklet with the OEM number belongs to the W95 CD that was separate in the same banana box, so it's fully useable. And I already had an official W95 boot diskette.

OK, after some 486 struggles I have Ontrack and W95 installed. Works snappy at 800*600 16 bit (1MB Cirrus card, I could upgrade it to 2MB). Gave it some basic autoexec and config.sys, now a good 601k free and that is with MSCDEX but without mouse driver. To be optimised (and slightly beyond my knowledge other than using ctmouse for mouse).

Epic Pinball works smooth in dos, with sound.

Speaking of sound: a lot of interference from other PC parts when using headphones, haven't tested with speakers yet. The volume is LOUD so likely with speakers turned down a bit it is a lot less noticable.

@FalconFour maybe I should send you the original disk image so you can experiment away with the capture card? That card is not my current focus so I'll likely not get to it in the coming years...