Capturing VGA - Part 5

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 powered VGA splitter that you can use to provide a VGA signal to four monitors. It works flawlessly and has stopped any flickering. 

As for the audio I mentioned, I bought this:


The output from the scaler is HDMI and it connects to the HDMI input of this device (around the back) and you provide audio via Line In and it merges the audio into the video signal, so I no longer have to worry about hum or mono audio due to the dodgy 3.5mm audio cable I was using. 

A slight annoyance about this device is it needs it's own power supply but can be powered from a USB power bank. 

So here's the final diagram:


 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Capturing VGA - Part 1

Image
A few years back I decided that I wanted to do some VGA capture from my old vintage computers so I could show it off in my YouTube videos. This lead me down a dark hole to try and get a working solution. I'd seen a couple of cheap VGA capture devices on eBay so bought a few to try. None of them were successful. I tried several different ways of doing it and I was pulling my hair out until  I stumbled upon a video by a fellow retro computer enthusiast called Victor Bart . He has done a fantastic video on the way he does it.  Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel I figured I'd give his solution a go. The only thing I changed was the capture card - mine is USB, not PCI-E. The secret sauce is the VGA scaler. Many older machines and games in DOS output at strange resolutions and switch between them frequently. Most of which these newer cheap VGA capture devices don't support these old resolutions. For example: the Windows 98 start up screen displays at something like 720x400....
Read more

Stray for macOS released!

Image
I was desperate to play this game since it was announced and I was excited to hear it coming over to Apple Silicon. On launch day I downloaded it and I've so far been blown away by the graphics that my little M2 Mac mini is able to output. Here's a screenshot of some game play from my actual Mac mini.  The only thing I don't like about it is the Zurks! And if you know, you know ;)  I haven't finished the game yet but I just wanted to mention how gorgeous this game is and I'm super excited about it being available on the Mac. 
Read more