I got a WinTV card from C128Retired (Thanks, Dan!) and plugged it into my PC. It took a bit of fiddling, but after not too long I was able to watch TV in a window on my PC. Pretty cool. But the card also has video and audio inputs, and it wasn't too long before my two remaining brain cells rubbed together and thought, 'Hey! My C128 outputs video and audio!"
I rummaged in my cable box and came up with two RCA splitters (1 male-to-2 female), a two-line RCA audio cable, and an RCA-to-mini adapter. I plugged the splitters into the back of my 1902A, plugged the C128 monitor cable into one side and the RCA dual-audio cable into the other, stuck the mini adapter on the audio side, and plugged both into the WinTV.
I turned on the C128 in 40-column mode and, as I had more or less expected, I saw on the 1902A screen that I had some signal drop. No big deal. I just boosted the brightness, hue, and contrast, and it didn't look much worse than usual. Now for the real test. I fired up the WinTV application and selected the video input. The C128 screen came up cleaner and clearer on WinTV that it does on my 1902A!. It's not perfect, mind you, but it's very, very watchable.
Not only that, WinTV lets me snapshot screens AND record videos from my C128 output! (I'll post a snapshot here later after I get home.)
I've got one weird problem - if I hit Ctrl-T to snap the TV window to full screen, after about a second it switches to the broadcast input. But I can manually expand the window to 1% less than full screen and it's fine. So I can keep my 40-column screen displayed on my LCD monitor, and my 80-column screen on my 1902A, and suddenly I'm a dual-display kind of guy!
The audio is nice, too. I've got SID sounds, PC system sounds, my PC microphone, and TV audio all nicely mixed through the PC's audio mixer panel and into my amplified speakers. Because of my mono mini adapter, SID only comes out on the left channel of the PC but I've still got SID sound at the 1902A speaker so it's still blasting from two sides even if it's not 'real' stereo. And now I can do karaoke with SID accompaniment! :)
Is this a hack? Yes. Is it perfect? No. But it's better than what I had before. Besides, it was super-cheap and the extra features this setup gives me make it WAY worth keeping it set up this way.
Do you experience any lag in this setup? I've done some experiments a few years ago with a couple of different TV capture cards and through a video camera that does analog-to-digital and all of them had enough lag as to not be usable for playing games. The video camera was so bad that even typing on it was maddening.
That's great airship.:hurra: Now try the composite output from the 80-col connector (pin-7 and (pin-1gnd)).
There won't be any color but it would be interesting to see if it works.:ironisk:
Dan...
Typing seemed to be fine. I don't play many games, but I'll try playing a game and report back on any timing issues. I had a game demo up and snapped a couple of screens, but I didn't try to play.
I have noticed that when you snapshot a screen from the TV tuner, it works best to hit the 'freeze' button first. Otherwise you sometimes get halves of sequential frames interlaced. Screen captures form the C128 look a bit pale and have a few artifacts, but they clean up nicely in Paint Shop Pro without much effort at all.
In my mind, we're not talking 'oh, this is perfection', here, but 'wow, for a totally free hack this ain't bad'.
Dan, I didn't really want to try 80 column mode, figuring it would be horrid. Plus I was mostly interested in having dual displays. But you're right, I need to try it and see just how bad it is. I'll post a screen capture of that, too.
Give me a few days.
I really need to get one of those composite 80 column cables. I only ever use 80 column mode for text (okay, 99% of the time) so I don't need colour and that cable will give me a great deal more flexibility. I really want to see what the output looks like.
You can read it okay on a 1702. But I don't think I'd want to do that to my eyes all day.
I've just got a little adapter (DE-9 to RCA) that screws into the back of my C128. Somebody made and sold these back in the day. It's pretty cool.
How about trying hydrophilic's interlaced mode? :)
Screen Captures:
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/c128_main.png)
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/pacman.jpg)
Pacman played fine - no delays. I sucked just as bad on the PC screen as I do on the 1902A screen. :)
Of course, there is some jittering during animations - the ghosts & Pacman move just fine, but his mouth opening and closing is a blur. The picture is - surprise! - more like having it hooked up to a TV set than to a monitor.
(Note that the WinTV software lets you snapshot at several different sizes.)
Geez, nikoniko, do you want BOTH my PC AND my LCD to blow up? :D
Nice screenshots, Airship! Looks more 128-authentic with the faint vertical lines... :tummenupp:
-Andrew
Quote from: wiskowLooks more 128-authentic with the faint vertical lines... :tummenupp:
Ugh. Those lines are the bane of my existence.
Quote from: gklingerUgh. Those lines are the bane of my existence.
I've tried and tried to get rid of them on my 128's to no avail, so I know exactly what you mean. :/
-Andrew
I wonder why Commodore never fixed that. Between the first and last 128s, they changed SIDs (whether for better or worse has long been debated), but they couldn't take some time to revise the 8564 VIC to get rid of those annoying lines?
Yet another project at hand
Your screen shots are fantastic! My screen shots look absolutely terrible in comparison (using an ATI video card) although on screen they look decent enough. There is also no lag at all -- I use it with PlayStation games all the time.
Gklinger, it is super easy to make your own 80-column monochrome connector. All you need is an RCA cable and wire cutters/strippers. Takes about 10 minutes. I posted about this here (http://landover.no-ip.com/128/viewtopic.php?id=732). It looks fantastic (for monochrome) on my TV but I haven't tried it with my video capture card. Ooops. I guess that's what you really wanted to know...
Those vertical lines are usually filtered out mentally :) I usually have to actually look hard to see them. Intersting (to me anyway) is that I have a home-made 40 column cable that I connect to the composite input on my large TV. Normally the faint vertical stripes can be seen (if I look hard enough), BUT the wire will sometimes work itself loose from moving the computer around as I sit on the living room sofa (I'm too lazy to actually solder the connections :/)...
Anyway, I've noticed with a loose connection that color intensity drops a little but more importantly (maybe) the vertical lines disappear completely! I don't know if that can be used to anybody's advantage...
At least airship's C128 doesn't seem to have as severe a problem as some units. For example, some screen shots by wte show quite harsh vertical stripes.
QuoteAt least airship's C128 doesn't seem to have as severe a problem as some units. For example, some screen shots by wte show quite harsh vertical stripes.
The "stripe problem" is definitely a function of brightness, contrast, and color saturation (settings on the monitor).
To minnimize the stripe effect you have to optimize brightness and color saturation. [Or use always a black background :skratta:]
I cheat, too. I clean them up a bit with Paint Shop Pro. I don't paint over any bits, but I do twiddle the color and contrast some to get the best-looking image I can.
Really, though, I don't do much to them.
Okay, I tried it with hydrophylic's interlace demo. Here are the results:
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/int_txt.jpg)
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/int_pic.jpg)
The text didn't do too well. But the picture sure looks nice. :)
I used the default settings for both. I don't know if tweaking the settings would make any difference or not.
And just to keep EVERYONE satisfied, I hooked up the 80-column monochrome output:
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/80_txt.jpg)
(http://home.mchsi.com/~airship1/80_pic.jpg)
Note carefully how very, very much both images suck.
In fact, the text screen jittered like crazy, and the interlaced pix I tried had all kinds of problems. Some had field offset problems. Some wouldn't sync, or would sync halfway down the screen. But I figured that really didn't matter since when they did show up, they sucked so bad anyway. Both text and graphics displayed fine using the 80-column monochrome input on my 1902A, even when split off to the PC connection.
Conclusion: The WinTV video input connection works very well for viewing and snapshotting regular 40-column C128 VIC-II output. But it sucks for 40-column interlace and 80-column monochrome. Big time.
My C128 is feeling very traumatized by this entire experience. I am now restoring her to her normal connections and settings. Hopefully she will make a full recovery.
Thanks for checking that out. I wonder why the monochrome... isn't?
RE: 40 column interlace. Did you try any of the de-interlacing options in the WinTV app? Maybe that would clean up the text a bit.
Yeah, I tried all the settings in WinTV, including deinterlacing. The defaults were actually the best. :(
Quote from: nikonikoThanks for checking that out. I wonder why the monochrome... isn't?
RE: 40 column interlace. Did you try any of the de-interlacing options in the WinTV app? Maybe that would clean up the text a bit.
I believe the monochrome wasn't because the software was attempting to recreate the "color" effect that Woz used in the original Apple II with the logic-based video that created color by causing signal bleed. Other people can explain it much better than I can, but I'm sure the software things there's supposed to be bleed when there's not supposed to be any.
I also wonder if these screenshots were taken at native NTSC resolution and if the video capture card was using a lossy transport mechanism. Some cards output all data as MPEG2 and the software just renders the MPEG2 stream.
Ah... color artifacting. That makes sense. Some DOS based games also used the same or a similar principle to finagle more and nicer colors out of CGA when connected to a composite monitor.
Would be kind of interesting to see which bit patterns produce what colors and then construct a custom graphic which takes advantage of that, though pretty pointless since there aren't likely to be many people hooking their 128s up to an old color composite monitor or a WinTV card. :)
Doggone it, Payton, I started to post that stuff about Woz and the Apple and decided to just leave it be. Now you sound smarter than I do! :P
Airship
What software are you using to do the video capture? I haven't found any software that doesn't have lag from buffering the video to hard drive since all I can find is PVR software.
I'm just using the Capture button in the WinTV application. Actually, I'm using the Freeze button first, then the Capture button. Works great.
Ah, so it's the software that came with your card. I am building a system for my son for Christmas and the OEM video capture card I bought (the only one I could find that was both low-profile and PCIe) didn't come with any software, and when I download the software from the distributor of the card it crashes in Vista. :(
That capture of the interlace is wacked! At first it was showing only 1 field but close examination indicates both are present... My ATI video capture card has hardware support for de-interlacing. I believe it turns itself off if you set the capture rate to > 30fps. With it on, it doesn't always do a good job (even from standard video sources). Airship, it sounds like you had similar problems with VDC interlace images?
About the color on the VDC: that would make sense IF you used a composite connection. Since composite mixes color with luminance, high-frequency signals (thin lines etc) will be interpreted as a color!
If available, try to use S-Video instead of Compostie connection for the VDC screen. I think that would make it much better! Of course if you DID use S-Video then I have no clue where the color comes from... I won't blame you if you don't try this, I haven't bothered to build an S-Video cable even for myself :)
Another thing about VDC is you need enough capture resolution. My ATI only captures the full screen (including borders) at max 640x480 which means it could never accurately capture the VDC since it is something like 720 horizontal with border. Maybe your WinTV will go that high?
BTW, the VDC scans look like they came from an old VHS tape :) Plbyrd is correct about the capture stream format. I found signicant artifacts (for computer text maybe OK for live vide) when using the default MPEG2 driver even when capturing still images. I got the best images by changing to an AVI format. But be wardned, AVI will eat up your hard drive space!
Anyway, thanks for the screen shots. Very interesting.
I tried it with interlace on AND off. Didn't work either way. The software can capture at many different resolutions. I tried them all - no dice. The WinTV card only has composite input. Besides, how are you going to get SVideo from the VDC? :)
QuoteBesides, how are you going to get SVideo from the VDC?
Connect the monochrome pin (and ground) to the Y channel of the S-Video. Of course this will be monochorme. I'm pretty sure they sell these, but I'd have more fun doing it myself. Besides eliminating intended color, it should eliminate the random colors. Um, I guess it doesn't matter w/o an S-Video connector!