welcome! I shall hope you find something listed here at least partially helpful. My recent ideas of getting these old early-1990s Creative Labs cards working in these "modern" ages has led me to many dead ends. I hope I can help eliminated some of these for others.

• 30May1998,21:56: in the beginning, there was darkness....then a little yellow came...then "live" video on the desktop...and then, on the final day, there was...THIS.

Video Blaster, you ask? You mean that really long ISA board that's less than a meter from the round file and getting closer everyday? What modern use could that peice of junk actually have in this 30fps world!?!? Well...lots.

Ok, so maybe not LOTS, but several anyway. I'm not going to get real specific here, because that's pointless: you're going to use it for whatever you think it's usefull for, even if that use involves a garbage can, right? So they're slow, and they're not compatible with most modern machines. But, Video Blasters do have uses. And they can be made more compatible.

1. "You cannot use the Video Blaster when there is more than 15Mb of RAM installed in the system." -- the geniuses at "Creative" Labs
2. "You must use the feature connector on your video card in order to use the VideoBlaster but my video card either doesn't have a feature connector or it doesn't work."

For #1: yes, in order to use the VideoBlaster grabbing features, you must not have RAM from 15MB-16MB. Notice the wording. Many newer BIOS's (and even some old ones) have the ability to configure a hole in the RAM address space between 15MB (0xF00000) and 16MB. As long as your operating system supports it (Win95 and Linux (patch required, see below) are two that do), you can use the VideoBlaster card just fine with that hole there.

For #2: ok, so ya, for 100% functionality you must use the feature connector and the fancy octopus and passthrough cabling. But, that's only for overlay -- you don't need all that to just capture frames. BTW, there are several video cards that have a feature connector, yet the manufacturer didn't wire it, making the feature header completely useless (ask Number Nine about the Imagine 128's feature connector; go on! ask them! Complain to them for me!). But, since most of the old Windows and DOS-based apps that came with the card require the overlay, you're stuck; I guess you'll have to install Linux! Also, the overlay has no real purpose besides watching television at the full frame-rate, so it's no big loss. (You can still watch TV without the overlay, but it will cost you CPU cycles and you won't get full frame rate -- you'll be luck to get 20fps! I usually get about 5fps across a 10Mb Ethernet in a 240x180 window, and up to 15fps locally (or up to 11fps across ether at 120x90).)

The best way to prove all this to you is probably to let you see for yourself. So here's some samples to see if you feel like pulling out your old VB...

I've taken several grabs from the infamous movie "Speed". MGM would probably have my head (or at least my income for the next few decades) if they knew I was posting these, but... (BTW, the original VHS tape these came off of is courtesy of the good guys at Digital Equipment Corp! (They sent it in promotion of thier really cool StorageWorks RAID arrays -- which are very SPEEDy. If you need a bunch more gigs of disk space and have an extra twenty or thirty thousand USD laying around, buy one!)

• speed.jpg (45kb)
• speed2.jpg (12kb)
• speed3.jpg (45kb)

And as I've said, you can watch television without the overlay. I've been doing this alot lately. I've posted a screenshot of my desktop while watching TV (more specifically, NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno"). It's in a 240x180x16 box in X windows running in 32bpp mode on a 1280x1024 desktop, which is something you can't actually do when using the overlay. You'll also notice I'm running this from across the network (my VB is actually in echidna, which probably explains most of the slow frame rates I've been getting), but I haven't gotten network sound going yet, so I watch in silence.

• screenshot_tv.jpg (270kb): there's a lot of stuff in this shot; the TV window is in the middle. I've also got AOL's AIM running so I can discuss matters with my Winblows-based friends (here, awwaiid), as well as BitchX and a couple of pines and things.

• Bernhard Schwall's VideoBlaster/ROMBO MediaPro+ apps (including the XVideo app shown in the screenshot) don't appear to be maintained anymore, but they do work. He also say's that they'll work under DOS (I haven't tried that, so you're on your own). They're available at sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/video/vid_src-0.7.tar.gz.
• Christer Weinigel has coded a patch to the Linux 2.0.x kernels to support the memory hole provided by some newer BIOS's to allow the VB to work when you have more than 15mb of RAM. There are several patches out there that do essentially the same thing, but I liked Christer's the best (for one, it can do autodetection of the hole if you have a iTriton chipset). It's available off of their really nifty big VAX at rvs.ctrl-c.liu.se:/pub/wingel/memory-hole-2.0.29.diff. Although it says 2.0.29, there have been few enough VM changes in the 2.0.x kernels that it should apply without rejection to most (it applied cleanly to my 2.0.33).

!eybdoog