Capturing Footage From Retro PCs

Greetings and welcome to a brief LGR thing while I work on more involved LGR things for the upcoming near future. And this is just going to be talking about VGA capture solutions for older PCs, and newer-ish PCs because I capture a wide range of systems. I’m also getting questions about it. But more recently I was getting very specific questions because of the MCE2VGA box. This is a converter for video signals. It takes TTL RGBI right there for like old computers running CGA, EGA, and monochrome and such. And sends them to the other side here for standard VGA output.

It’s pretty great but it also doesn’t work with every capture device that I have, and I mentioned that in the video and people were like “well what do you have?” Anyway, my setup is always changing its gonna change again, but for now this is my basic setup. So I’ve got a newer Windows 10 PC capturing things over there and then over here is where I do most of the actual capturing. 

And I like a separate station for this because not only do I get a nice CRT that feels appropriate for a lot of the stuff I cover, but it also is just actually passing through and being split. So that I can play and mess with software over here as it’s intended and it feels right and nothing is getting weird because of, you know, delay or anything like that.

What happens over here to make that happen is I’ve got several different PCs down here. At the moment the main ones that I use are the LGR Wood grain 486, that’s a 66 megahertz. Got the Lazy Green Giant running Windows 98 and 95.

And most recent one is the XP machine. I’ve just had a bunch of problems capturing VGA directly so now I do a lot of conversion. So let’s talk about all that stuff!

Right, so. Main capture area, got the computers down there and whatever I’m plugging in goes through these splitters right here. I have a powered VGA splitter and also some audio splitters to take the sound and the video over to whatever capture device I happen to need. And I’m pretty much never satisfied with these things, I’ve gone through a bunch of them. There’s always interference problems. So I’m not saying these are the ones that will work for you or anything. None of this stuff is, it’s just what I’m using at the moment.

In fact, there’s also some ground problems I’ve had and of audio capture. I’ve eliminated that as much as I can, you know but sometimes you just have sound cards that are noisy. Other components that are interfering, getting in the way, or the wiring in your house or whatever like, I’ve done what I can. But using some of these ground loop isolators or eliminators or whatever, these filter boxes. 

They actually work pretty darn well, at least for certain types of ground loop hums. So that’s the first step in the process is just sending everything through some splitters and filters and stuff to make sure that I don’t have any lag and I get as clear a signal as possible. And then at that point it goes along in between here to get to my main capture PC. And that goes through one of these StarTech VGA2HDMI Pro version one boxes.

I think this is a rebranded Microsoft device. But yeah, this is the version one of it, its unfortunately discontinued. And there are later versions but as far as I know this is the only one that handles some of the weirder lower res and strange refresh rates and aspect ratios. Say you’ve got something running at like, I don’t know, 320x200 at 70 hertz or whatever. 

This’ll handle that just fine and upscale it to 720p or 1080p or whatever you need, really. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it puts an annoying little status notification in the top left anytime the resolution changes. It’s also not the quickest at changing resolutions, so that’s a problem sometimes. And it also washes out the signal a little bit which I have to correct in Adobe Premiere CC, which is what I use to edit stuff.

Now the nice thing is that it actually does capture the audio as well and sends that to HDMI so I don’t have to worry about plugging in another audio cable over in my capture device side. Speaking of the capture device I’ve used this for a very long time. Another discontinued product, this is an Aver media Game Broadcaster HD. I do plan to replace this at some point because it doesn’t actually capture really high resolution, higher frame rate stuff. Like I want something to capture 4K 60 and I just haven’t gotten anything to do that yet. But the old Game Broadcaster still works.

I used to use the VGA capture part of it actually, but that’s the thing -- the part of it that doesn’t capture the weirder resolution stuff, which is why I need that StarTech scaler box in the first place. So in a way yeah, this card is kind of redundant. Another thing that I use though is this Aver Media Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus. 

This is an external -- actually a standalone capture solution, if you want it to be. It just uses USB power or you can plug it into USB and use some software to capture things. But if you just power it by USB it has this internal Micro SD card interface and its really nice because it not only has built-in pass-through for HDMI, but you don’t have  believe a laptop or software or whatever to urge your capturing done.

The best aspect I don’t like about it although is you can’t truly see precisely what’s taking place in terms of like, the settings or something. In truth all the settings are just inner as an extended way as I recognize and it best captures at a

set kind of lower bitrate whilst you’re taking pictures to the SD card. But yeah, totally great for taking pictures low res older sport pictures. I’m nonetheless having to believe that StarTech scaler albeit, thanks to route this doesn’t capture VGA, an awful lot less something decrease res than that. I do have a special answer and this doesn’t require the utilization of the StarTech scaler in any respect. And that is that the Epiphan AV.Io HD. Ay-vee-oh, I don’t recognize its this component.

And it certainly captures the usage of DVI, but of route you'll also seize HDMI or VGA with a simple adapter. It doesn’t seize audio, however the video that it does seize is genuinely brilliant. In reality you'll plug this straight right into a VGA card, sort of a DOS PC, and run CGA and EGA things all day lengthy and it’ll handle them. This is first rate just in case you only don’t got to clutter with a gaggle of adapters and what not. 

A couple things that I don’t like about it, I imply it doesn’t seize audio, that’s kind of a pain. You have to route that into something else. And it doesn’t have any of its own software, which is both a blessing and a curse. Its excellent which you don’t need to address anything proprietary however its additionally traumatic due to the very fact many the distinct software program I’ve used that's compatible with this aspect, its simply quite irksome.

It doesn’t handle the one-of-a-kind resolution modifications and scaling like I desire that it'd. And you recognize vintage PC video games and software, they’re changing resolution and refresh prices all the time. So whenever it does that you’re normally having to move things round inside the software program and that’s just kind of a crappy thing. 

Whereas if I’m using the StarTech it just handles all that on its own, it scales all The matters internally then sends it out HDMI during a single popular resolution and refresh rate all the time. But again AV.io HD, it captures the older systems as long as it’s got VGA of course. And it’ll also accept the MCE2VGA box just fine.

You don’t need to do any kind of other conversion with it. So just in case you only plug this directly into the AV.Io HD it really works. Otherwise i need to plug it into my StarTech tool to urge it to running on my Aver media stuff. And I desired to start attempting some different matters too, thanks to the very fact another time i want something for like 4K and truly only a newer card than that vintage Broadcaster HD that I even have internally over there. Its fine, it works.

But I hope that this was helpful in some ways, a very scattered kind of video but it’s a scattered kind of process. I will have some coverage of some stuff pretty soon, more of a normal LGR fare.

But yeah, till then thank you very much for watching!

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