Rich's Random Retro Reviews

In January last year I decided I needed a dedicated space for all of my retro collection/toys/computers/stuff so I bought a log cabin and built it in the garden. It's 4m x 3m and looked like this when I started: It took me about 4 months from start to finish.  I painted the outside and put the felt roof on to make the structure watertight.  Inside I installed 100mm insulation on all four walls, the ceiling and under the floor was some 25mm insulation.  I installed a vapour barrier.  Then plasterboard before painting. I've never plastered before so I left it quite rough thinking I could just sand it down.  Sanding was not fun.  So that's it. That's the studio - where I film my YouTube videos from.

I'm hoping that this will be the last post about how I capture VGA from my old retro machines as I think I now have a solution that works well. It also captures audio and injects that into the HDMI signal too.  So what's different from my last four posts? Well not much to be honest, other than I've changed the powered VGA splitter I'm using. For some reason, the two Startech splitters I bought, and worked fine, for some reason have introduced a flicker on my capture machine. So much so that the video is unusable. I've tried different cables and I even bought an identical one thinking my existing one was faulty. I went back to using the unpowered splitter cable, even though it produced a noticably darker image which I could fix in edting.  I'm on a discord server where a fellow YouTuber mentioned what they use, so off to eBay I went and I managed to purchase this: It's an Extron P/2 DA4xi 1:4 Four-Output VGA Video Distribution Amplifier DA - basically a power...