Question about Using TV Tuner Card with Vic-20

Barney · Post by **Barney** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:08 pm

I have an interresting question. If I install a PCI TV Tuner card in my PC and plug my VIC-20 into it, will it output successfully to my my PC LCD monitor? Just curious if this is possible. Having two monitors on my desk is taking up too much space.

Barney

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:14 pm

As long as the card has an RF and/or composite input (or an S-Video input and your VIC-20 has the S-Video mod) then yeah, it should work. There's a guy at Lemon who does that with his 64. I tried something similar on my notebook once with a USB tuner but there was a lag.

Barney · Post by **Barney** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:19 pm

The one I am looking at has an RF input. If there is any lag at all, I'm not going to bother. Is there likely going to be a lag using the RF input or do you think I'll be fine.

Barney

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:23 pm

I don't think it has anything to do with the input(s) but rather the processing capability of the card and/or the PC-side software. I'm sorry but I can't say authoritatively. Maybe you could search Google for reviews of the TV tuner card to see if anyone talks about lag? Not much of a suggestion but that's all I've got.

Barney · Post by **Barney** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:41 pm

I did a little googling and found out that the cards that perform MPEG encoding have a noticeable lag. I might be ok. I saw some cheap ones around $15 on ebay. For that price, its worth a shot.

Barney

Post by **Jeff-20** » Thu Jan 14, 2010 11:52 pm

I have one of those cheap 13 inch LCD TV monitor combos. It didn't cost much and it takes little desk space, but I don't use it anymore. I prefer to use the vic from the foot of my bed connected to a large CRT tv. I bet you could get a monitor like this for really cheap now.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Fri Jan 15, 2010 1:18 am

I recently bought an used 15" TFT monitor which has VGA, S-Video and composite inputs. It is a noname brand and used, so I get what I pay for. In VGA text mode (MS-DOS) the characters flicker and bleed a little. In composite mode (VIC-20) the screen just barely keeps sync, but I blame that on poorly implemented composite video on the VIC and many other systems of the 1980's.

Granted there will be some sort of lag when you run the video through a capture card, the question is how many frames behind you will be. After all you have hardware which converts an analog video signal to digital data, processed by the PC CPU which in its turn puts graphic data for the graphic card to render onto screen.

Bacon · Post by **Bacon** » Fri Jan 15, 2010 1:22 am

I use a PCI TV card with the very common BT848 chip and it works great. No lag that I can see. But don't bother going through the VIC's RF modulator – connect it straight to the composite jack on the TV card (or the S-video jack if you've done the S-video mod on your VIC).

You can see screen dumps from my VIC connected to the TV card on the wiki. the last three screenshots are mine.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Fri Jan 15, 2010 1:28 am

I wonder which are the fastest, most timing critical VIC-20 games. Those you could use as benchmarks to see if your setup is fast enough. It may depend on where into the game you are.

Richard James · Post by **Richard James** » Fri Jan 15, 2010 11:38 pm

I tried to use a capture card but the capture is not very good for realtime use since the output is in a small box.

My monitor has composite input but not a very good scaler from the PAL to its native 1920x1200 resolution. This makes the artefacts quite bad.

I'm considering converting my VIC to S-Video because the monitor also has S-Video input. This should give me the clearest signal.

I did have a 20" Sony Bravia LCD TV for using with retro systems. Small and very good display. However because many TV stations in Australia have moved to Digital that replaced the main CRT TV in the loungeroom. The CRT would not fit on my desk.

I do have a 1084 monitor as well but you can't hook a VIC up to that.

Barney · Post by **Barney** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 12:27 am

Bacon, you mentioned that your TV Tuner card uses the BT848 chip. What model/brand card do you have. If yours works fine then that is definitely the one I need to look into buying.

Thanks.

Barney

Pedro Lambrini · Post by **Pedro Lambrini** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 4:04 am

Richard James wrote: I do have a 1084 monitor as well but you can't hook a VIC up to that.

Sorry for the OT but doesn't the 1084 have composite inputs?

Slightly more on topic but personally I would sacrifice a lot of space just to keep a CRT telly for the Vic. I've tried lots of screens in different set ups but the best picture by a mile is on a cheap 14" portable telly. If you use the Vic for any length of time you'll really appreciate it.

Richard James · Post by **Richard James** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 6:24 am

Pedro Lambrini wrote:Sorry for the OT but doesn't the 1084 have composite inputs?

It has Chroma and Luma inputs is there some way to plug composite into it that I don't know of? The wiki page on the 1701/1702 monitors shows a picture of a split chroma and luma input on one of those.

Edit

After googling for a bit I see that the 1084 has Audio/Video/Chroma inputs. You can plug the VIC20 into the Audio/Video

Bacon · Post by **Bacon** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 7:56 am

Barney wrote:Bacon, you mentioned that your TV Tuner card uses the BT848 chip. What model/brand card do you have. If yours works fine then that is definitely the one I need to look into buying.

It's an old OEM (i.e. no brand, no name) card I bought years and years ago, but any PCI card with that chip and a composite input should work just as good as mine. The trouble is of course to find out which cards use the BT848 chip. I can't help you there but I know it's a very common chip.

Richard James wrote:After googling for a bit I see that the 1084 has Audio/Video/Chroma inputs. You can plug the VIC20 into the Audio/Video

My 1084s (the stereo version of the 1084) has a chroma and a luma input in the back and a pushbutton that switches one of them to composite input.

Spirantho · Post by **Spirantho** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 6:06 am

You'll find most card use the successor to the Bt8x8 chipset - the Conexant CX2388x chipset.

There will be a lag, but hopefully not a noticable one, and you may get some interlacing weirdness because of the scandoubling. However, it should work if you can put up with those (usually minor) issues.

When I was developing the BT8x8 and Cx2388x capture drivers for AmigaOS 4, I actually used a C64 as my test composite signal!