Creative 3DO Blaster VGA Passthrough Things
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2020
- Talking a little more about the 3DO Blaster card and how it works with VGA signals and how it requires the VESA feature connector to function. See my full LGR Oddware episode for context: • LGR Oddware - Creative...
Too bad they didn't call that edition "Wolfenstein 3DO"...
Missed opportunity! Regerts.
What about 3DO OM
Yep, was asking myself the same thing.
@@user-uf4qr7os4s DOOM3D "Doomed" could have worked too...allthough not sure people could speak 1337 then. :p
@@karlandersson4350 i think 1337 became widespread in the early 00's and had a short revival in the 2010's but i guess people with common sense could make it out even back then ;D
I like that Clint is seeming to address us as Blerbs.
That's cool, I always felt like a blerb anyway
We're not tho?
im blerb.
Really enjoying blerbs! Keep 'em coming!
Not that I don't love the main channel but yeah this channel reminds of of the balls original 10 years ago
At first I didn't sub to that channel because I thought it was gonna be boring. I don't know why i thought that. This channel is also amazing.
This card is massively impressive for Windows 3.1. It did not have any market sense, but it's utterly fascinating.
LGR Blerbs: Playing console ports of PC games on a PC with a console card
We can go deeper, we have the technology! On an emulator inside a virtual machine...
This is getting closer to Druaga1 madness. Love it.
@@666lordofdestruction I miss those days of Druaga1 😔
That moment when the light went off, made the video way more cosy!
Speaking of 3DO ports of id games, there’s actually a really good source port of 3DO Doom by Darragh Coy called Phoenix Doom, since Rebecca Heinemann released the source code in 2014. It plays the original 3DO disc image with improved lighting and in 60 FPS. And of course, the music is fantastic.
In the mid 90's I had a TV tuner card by Philips also using this overlay thechnique. Its amazing that many solutions back then used this to lay over the standard VGA signal and doing their special thing.
Worth to mention Amiga 2000 Video Toaster but doing it over analog video signal and switching between two and adding some high quality video effects. They could literally use it up until 2000 and possibly even further before HDTV was introduced
The old Haupage winTV tv tuner card i had also used a VGA pass-through to overlay via chromakey iirc.
Not that amazing really. the Idea was by doing those all in one cards was they figured it would make it easier for people to buy them since theoretically almost any newer computer on the market should be able to handle it since all the work is done on the card and not the computer. The problem was that becasue they were essentially a seperate computer they cost so much that generally only people who would have a high end computer could probably afford them
@@KabelkowyJoe pity it was so closely tied to the NTSC standard. An official PAL/SECAM version would have sold very well in Europe.
It's a vertical sync signal that's missing if you don't have the passthrough; the start of the vertical scan for the Win98 machine is going to be randomly different than the start of the 3DO's vertical scan. The sync signal lets the card synchronize the vertical scans. That torn screen that you showed is telltale.
VGA has both vsync and hsync, there isn't really a reason it couldn't use those
Melted Spades The digital video data is available via the feature connector. Much cheaper and more reliable to monitor that digital data for the “choma key” color values and simply switch between the two analog signals from the VGA and 3DO outputs than it would be to sample the analog VGA output with an expensive fast ADC. This is why the chroma key still appears to work even when the analog VGA cable is unplugged - it’s getting the mask data from the feature connector, and presumably the syncs as well.
@@CoverMechanic If you run the vid at quarter speed slow-mo you can see the win98 picture banding across the 3DO picture. Or has the whole screen refresh changed frequency, so that it's out of sync with his camera now? I'm definitely interested and keeping an eye on the comments for an alternate explanation for the tearing.
The horizontally skewed picture is a sign of horizontal sync at a slightly different speed. If only vertical were off you would have a picture rolling up or down but perfectly straight. The reason we see intelligible results at all is because the video timings are super close.
@@eDoc2020 I think this is the answer. The video clocks on the two systems are super close, but not quite the same. Generally, each video mode has a small range of supported frequencies to allow for variations in hardware timings. That's probably what's going on here, just a difference of a few kHz or so. When in the same system, they derive from the same clock, so there's no skew. Just a theory though.
That's the first time I've seen a version of Wolfenstein 3D with a CD Soundtrack :-o ! I'm surprised the version on PC has never been given that "updated" Soundtrack.
Never in a million years would I have predicted my dirty little secret would be watching these videos about computers I owned in the 90s.
This was such a fun video to watch, im really happy you continue to make these videos as there a treat to watch :)
Man I hope you‘re doing content of any kind for many many years. Freakin love your voice and the style you show the weirdest stuff. Thanks man, I mean really ❤️
Been going for over eleven years now, no plans on stopping :)
Ha. I remember old LGR. Or rather young LGR.
The story of that Doom port sure is something, it's amazing she even got it to work *at all* given the tiny amount of development time. Cool to see that Wolfenstein got the proper port it deserved.
Tiny amount of dev time _and_ complete and utter obliviousness of the guy who handed her the job IIRC. >.
For some reason I find her nickname (Burger Becky) to be pretty damn funny… just me then?
What, I've got pictures of the new guns right here. Don't you just put them into the game? it's easy right?
LGR, I was googling and saw you midnight loops come up on twitter, I don't use much social media but I figured I'd let you know here. Man, I bet a lot of us here would love a rundown of your set up, I never knew you were a music guy like that man.
"I want to be able to play videogames at my work and I could put in a purchase order request and nobody would ever know..."
The Guy who invented this
Man, the 3do Blaster! Such a great card. Wolfenstein 3d on the 3do was by far my favorite console port of Wolfenstein of that era. I loved the 90 levels and new music and sfx. Such a great version. So sad Rebecca wasn't given the time or resources to make the Doom port the 3do truly deserved. Such an underrated system. Excellent blerb, Clint!
The PC shareware version of Wolfenstein 3d was great! The 3do didn't add anything that the PC already had. FMV games? Rebel Assault? Road Rash? All covered. The 3do had 300+ games versus the thousands available on PC. The entire concept of this is stupid. Did X-wing come out on the 3do?
At one time, back in the 90s, I had 4 devices daisy chained through VGA passthrough cables. Voodoo2 > Voodoo2 > MPEG decoder card (for DVD playback ) > Matrox Millennium II 2D card. Seems crazy now, but was kind of awesome back then.
Surely that caused a degradation in video quality?
I'm pretty sure that you didn't need to connect the video passthrough to the second Voodoo2 in the SLI configuration.
gctechs That’s how the original Voodoo SLI worked. Card one did the top half of the screen and card 2 did the bottom half. Neither card did 2D, they were purely 3D acceleration. That part LGR talked about with chroma keying? That’s how these worked too, all over VGA overlaying. I actually listed the cards in reverse. It started with your 2D card, passing a VGA out to a voodoo vga in, then that vga out to another vooodoo vga in, then that vga out to a monitor. (I had my mpeg card in there somewhere too)
🏳️🌈 Lillian Charles 🏳️⚧️ Technically, you would think so. But it really was not noticeable back then if there was. Keep in mind, this was in a era of 800x600 - 1024x768 resolution environments.
@@StariusPrime Yes, but with the SLI configuration there was only one VGA passthrough cable, the cards themselves were connected by the flat bridging cable, similar to the floppy ribbon cable, but of course much shorter.
5:00 LOL.. "Ran outta battery. Screw that. Who cares?" Oh, LGR, you crack me up.
effort? what do you think this is, a main channel video?
all you 90's slackers out there... just stay put.
One of the coolest add-ons ever created, I dreamed about it back in the day and saved money to buy one. In the end I just bought a 3DO console (an FZ-10) because It was cheaper than the card itself plus the CD-ROM reader!! (that were pretty expensive too). What an amazing era!
Looks like the internal connector handles all the signal masking and sizing, that's why you could see black menus and the cursor from 3.1
This was a good Blurb! Very interesting.
Really enjoying LGR Blerbs
You were absolutely clear on the original video. Many people just don't pay attention.
Many people also don’t really understand how PC hardware works or have the imagination to see all the various odd things you can do with it.
Maybe i'm just too tech nerdy but i understood immediately what this was and how the passthrough worked from your video
Omg that interplay intro brings back some memories.
I definitely need this along with a CD-i/PC 2.0 in the same computer.
Oh man, that classic Interplay introduction.
I loved that interplay intro
It's amazing this thing was even produced! By 1993/94 I thoroughly enjoyed PC games like X-wing, Alone in the Dark, Panzer General, Dark Sun, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, etc. Why would I buy this for $400 and need a Panasonic CD drive??? Fascinating that the sold any of these!
Now if someone had created a cartridge based unit to play Super Nintendo or Genesis games on your PC, I would have gobbled that up (LGR Foods?) in a heartbeat!
I remember the blaster video! Lol just subbed to lgr blurbs I wasn’t aware it was a channel
If you had a twitch channel playing retro games with your usual history behind various things would be a cool thing to see!
So basically the feature connector provides genlocking to the 3do blaster. Neat
I love the Blurbs!!!
On an Amiga I'd call the internal connector the genlock effectively. In this case it seems like genlock plus overlay masking information.
This is similar to how Creative's dxr2 PC DVD player worked with its hardware MPEG-2 decoder card, doing a VGA pass-through to overlay the decoded video onto the desktop signal. As far as I recall, it didn't make use of the feature connector like the 3DO Blaster and instead got its sync via the VGA signal itself.
These MPEG decoding cards overclocked, later on became Transmeta Crusoe TM5600, TM5800 1GHz just DDR controler added exosting SDR and connected to south bridge trough PCI witch killed their performance so much it was impossible to even MPEG1 video on fool screen.. so iroinic :)
Full screen.. omg :)
@@KabelkowyJoe Wait, the Crusoe is based on MPEG cards? I'm skeptical, do you have any supporting info? Also, I'm quite sure I can watch fullscreen video on my thin client which has a 733MHz TM5800 for a CPU. I could pull it out and try it, but I'm too lazy.
The voodoo 3dfx did this too, it didn't need the feature connector
@@SimonQuigleyBut 3dfxs did that by simply switching inputs could not display 3D in window but only at full screen. Dxr2 could just like 3DO shown here - LGR ruclips.net/video/Amhqdbj0vpQ/видео.html
LGR Blerbs; Answering the questions I forgot to ask... :P
I have a Packard Bell TV tuner ISA card that uses a lot of the same techniques this 3DO card uses. Has the same VESA connector that goes to the video card. Bit of a weird device, but it works!
Awesomeneesss that i always wanted to have :D
To clear my name here, I was saying what IF we had Bleem-on-a-card lol but I still love this concept!
God damn, the 3DO version of wolfenstein looks so good. Those high resolution textures are just hmmm
You have to be careful with some later video cards, because they started dropping the feature connector support, even those with the pin header attached.
The original release of Wolfenstein on 3DO actually had a game breaking bug that would cause the game to crash every time after level 30 or 31. Interplay had to recall the game and issue a fixed version.
DOOM for 3DO was a train wreck from the get go. Logicware was told that there was a source code for 3DO, and the publisher literately held up a floppy of the PC version. After getting in contact with id, they were given a copy of the source code for the PC and Jaguar versions. Ultimately the Jaguar version was used. The publisher had no clue what they were doing in fact they were wanting to include new weapons and live action cut scenes. One of the costumes was actually featured on an issue of GameFan. Yeah, the 3DO port was made in 10 weeks, but at least one good thing is the killer soundtrack.
I recommend checking out the video Burgertime 7/12/2015: DOOM 3DO
since it goes into deep detail of the madness and stress of the making of the game.
I like the look better with the light out.
Rebecca had no time on Dooms port as i remember. I think she actually did really well with the time alotted though apparently..
I'm pretty sure there's also Famiclones on ISA cards, as well. The cartridge slot would go into one of your front drive bays. Not too sure how the video output would work, though.
I remember from your original video that a Mac version was supposedly under consideration. The main issue would be the ISA form factor. Now considering the year, 1994, it makes perfect since as PCI had only just begun to appear whereas ISA slots were as far as the eye could see. If this had come out a little later, where building it into a PCI form factor would have made more since, then making it Mac-compatible would have been only a matter of writing drivers for it. Having said all that, as neat an idea as it was, I doubt Creative made even a quarter of their development costs back on the original version (sad as that is for such a neat idea.)
I really wish you cover an Ati All in Wonder card and all its cool features!
Clint, you sound more interested (and it is also more interesting for most of us I think) on LGR Blerbs than LGR; for me it's like, Clint is back, am I the only one who prefers these blerbs to the new LGR videos?
I thought I knew exactly what was going on, and then you pulled the pass-through cable, but still had remnants of the overlay. That crashed my brain until you mentioned there being a feature connector link as well.
But that begs the question - why use both? The feature connector should give the 3DO access to the VGA card’s frame buffer. It could write directly to memory and have the VGA DAC output the analog signal without the need for chromakey or video mixing.
I have heard that the feature connector is limited to a 256 color palette, but I have Pentium II with a Voodoo 5 and a Creative DXR2 MPEG decoder connected by the feature connector (no VGA cable between them), and it works in high color modes. Doesn’t look like 8-bit paletized video...
The 3do logo reminds me of setting up chromecast
Oh, huh, it totally is a Chromecast startup.
"Greetings Blerbs". This should be an official greeting form from now on.
I too enjoy being called a blerb
It's a weird thing to me that people don't know how these VGA passthroughs work. They were kind of common around the time of late Windows 3.1 and during Windows 95's lifetime. My very first DVD drive (it was not a writer, not even of CDs) was a Creative branded one. I do not remember the model, but back then PCs were simply not powerful enough to decode DVD files in real time so it came with a card that had to be installed and used with a VGA passthrough. The little passthrough cable was called a "shunt" in the manual. And yea, the card did all of the decoding of the DVD and it used basically 0% CPU power or RAM so you could technically keep the movie playing in a small corner of the screen while you played a game or something. It was wild.
Oh, and it didn't have any internal connections besides the CD audio cable, but that connected to the sound card and not the decoder card.
Thing I was focusing on in this video was that MUSIC in Wolfenstein! I didn't know 3DO version had its own OST.
I love the avatar.
I’m more confused than ever on what 3DO is. Anyway keep the blerbs coming.
The 3DO is an old video game console, so you could basically take everything Clint says and replace it with PS1 and it would be basically the same. There just wasn't ever a PS1 available as an add-in card.
Was that a shortcut for San Francisco Rush on Windows 98, or am I just crazy? If so, I didn't know a version existed for PC.
I would like to know, too.
Edit: That very much looks like a shortcut for San Francisco Rush. I am now *very* interested about it now.
Blerbs is basically older LGR content that's new, and it's exactly what I was missing. Can you make this your new main channel please? 😁
I don’t know if your clarification clarified much of the butter. The Sega CD NV1 basically adds a piece of hardware that Saturn developers would know intimately (the NV1 aka the graphics of Saturn) to the PC thus minimizing the effort needed to port Saturn games to PC. The 3DO card is basically putting an entire console on a PC Card that runs all the games. It goes from a single commonality to entirety
this channel way better then the other guy who running the channel named LGR something.....lol!
3:15 reminds me of that Windows 9x maze screensaver
behind me in the shelf there is the 3DO Blaster but i need to take some time to figure out how to install the card and what old hardware i need for it. Are there any good sources where to start? I have plenty of old machines here, so i have a lot of hardware to test it but don't know where to start.
Yeah, I wouldn't expect the signal from the other computer to work, hsync and vsync will be completely off without another way to lock them together. Pins 11 and 12 of the feature connector provide those two sync signals, I expect that's what it's mostly being used for.
The thing that is really strange to me is the way that it uses the VGA signal to do compositing itself, but based on your demo, it decides which scanlines (and where within each one) to substitute video based on the contents of the screen buffer (as you demonstrate by unplugging the VGA cable and showing the ghost of the mouse and menus occluding the 3DO), rather than doing color-keying based on the video signal. I’m sure there are engineering reasons for this but the design that uses two separate inputs describing the same data but in two separate ways is surprising.
3dfx and creative dxr2 decoder card works with overlay without internal connector? Or do they do handle the genlock within the device itself?
The New Media Graphics Super Video Windows product lines used the same passthrough for their video integration.
Before you send that back, you should totally do some RetroRGB style input lag testing! How else will we know how responsive it id compared to a normal 3do ;) I only half kid though, that would be interesting to see!
So it's literally a 3DO on a card.
None of the game data is sent through the ISA port except for settings?
Basically using the ISA as power and config?
You got it.
Well no,not just config, its used to transfer game also. ISA so forget about DMA? All data demands CPU droven maybe im wrong. If ISA was DMA capable it could read data from CDROM itself
@@KabelkowyJoe from the documents posted online it takes the absolute minimum it can from the ISA slot and actually ignores completely/dumps some of what the ISA offers up to it. It's as close as something can get to using ISA for power alone. It's really interesting. Search it up for the plans and teardown that documents it. It literally is basically using the computer for as little as it can.
@@KabelkowyJoe The CD drive plugs into the 3DO card itself. The only thing going through the ISA bus is config and the weird input emulation thing it can do.
@@KabelkowyJoe ISA cards can use DMA, this is an essential part of the Sound Blaster's PCM playback. However, this is host-managed DMA and different from PCI bus-mastering (ISA cards can also do some bus mastering but this is rare).
Kind of like the 32X. Genesis creates some sprites, passes the video to the 32X, and then more sprites are added to create the final image. If you remove the 32X from the chain you get just the parts handled by the Genesis.
Should've shown the direct output of the VGA card without the passthrough. That 3DO player window would just show the keyed color then, right?
But what if you plug in the screen directly in to the video card instead of the 3d accelerator while 3DO is supposedly shows the game? Would the window show that key color? Is that what it does under DOS as well?
Great 👍
Now you gotta do a blurb on how the Saturn one works lol
So I assume that you can't use the 3D0 blaster on a dedicated external screen like the Mac DOS/PC cards?
Wonder if you could build an Ardiono board that could initialize the card sans PC. Then you could have a standalone 3DO that came from a PC card. The circle of life would be complete.
But you should also be able to run the 3DO card onto one monitor and the VGA card onto another, so you can play games on one while doing serious work on the other!
If i had to guess, the vsync signal is identical, but out of phase.
It should not be THAT out of phase.
It seems that, despite having sync from the VGA cable, it doesn’t use it. It’s slaving to the feature connector sync signals instead, which despite being at “60Hz” as well, aren’t going to be 100% locked (no two independent digital clocks ever are), and only coincidentally in phase for a brief moment as one laps the other.
@@nickwallette6201 I would assume the screen would have a constant vertically diagonal sheer tear moving left or right, as well as a single horizontal tear moving up or down, but what I see is far worse than my assumptions. Something else seems to be going on besides purely a sync issue. I think the card is dynamically altering the v/h sync for some reason.
Hm, well you can see the screen rolling from the vsync mismatch. The mess of random gray and white could be from the monitor trying to set the black level during the front porch of every line to what should be 0V on the RGB lines, but is actually pixel data.
@LGR Blerbs Looks like the in-PC connection is used to created a mask, which is why you see black shapes for the mouse cursor and pop-up menus. And that mask is used to draw parts of the PC video output around and over the 3D0 video output, so even if the Win98 output rendered correctly, it wouldn't align with the mask and it would look frozen, like you wouldn't be able to see Win98 mouse cursor move since the one on Win 3.1 wouldn't move in sync and that's the one it uses to produce the cut-out for the pass-through...
Wow, Rebecca Heineman's name coming up twice in one day. I'm friends with her wife; though we don't talk often we did have a conversation today in which she was mentioned.
If you talk to her again soon, let her know that her wife has some really big fans that admire her work to this day.
Where did you even get a 3-DO blaster because I can’t find one online anywhere
All thanks to a generous LGR viewer! Only borrowing it though.
Oh it’s simple: Steal a time machine and take a sports book with you to make lodsofemone. Still not working? Steal/Buy one.
@@LGRBlerbs "Borrowing it". I understand. ;)
Privileges of being a popular tech RUclipsr. These cards are extremely rare and extremely expensive if you find one, so you should probably not bother.
It's a gold nugget in hardware terms!😱🤑😋
Bleeeeerb!
oh Gateway, I remember the last time I saw that name was buying a complete Gateway desktop and installing an ATI card so I could play Battlefield 2 when it was released.
My first disk based console was a 3DO . And then I switched and went to a Playstation just because where I lived it was almost impossible to find games for the 3DO.
Same!
Does anyone else get nostalgic seeing Windows 3.1 on a CRT?
Good evening @LGR I was wondering where did you get your scart to vga for the supergun?
It would have been neat to see a game written where you needed both a PC and the 3DO card. With a lot of grunt work off loaded off you could really push the 486!
The 3do card doesn't use the pc cpu at all, so you can't write a game for it. You would first have to design a completely new card
Is there an ISA card that can run Crysis games on windows 3.1?
How much do you enjoy Win 3.1? Have you tried to get it to work with the Internet, or a LAN in any way?
i had an ISA TV-card that worked similar
So.. You passthrough the 2d card to the voodoo and then through this. Any more cards to add?:)
So the VGA pass through does the same thing that the AV cable that connects the 32X to the Genesis does, allows the 32X to overlay on the Genesis video output. (Or is it the other way around? Lol)
That's pretty sweet though, the other cable is literally just a clock, that syncs the two together.
I never really thought about it before, but now you mention it, it makes sense. You lost me a bit originally with the chroma part, but in essence that's just creating a "Green Screen" for the displays.
I thought the same thing about the 32X while watching. If I remember correctly the video can be ordered either way.
thing is when you tried to mix the win98 system into the mix like that you caused the Ground to float and you end up with the video not syncing.
Inception level: Deeeeeper
Aww yes 20th comment I've always wanted a 3do and that thing looks cool
So if you leave the VGA passthrough and unplug the feature connector, it will just go out of sync? or does the game now disappear?
Anybody wondering about the 3DO and its adventure with Doom, you should watch DF Retro's videos on Doom ports. It's pretty fascinating.
I guess Super Game Boy to SNES works like that. It has a true Gameboy chips and image outputs throught cardrigde's connector to Snes with border.
How do you film a CRT screen without the picture getting distorted?
Clint talking...
*Screams from the game in background*
I might have missed it on the original video but was there any way to plug the output from the Blaster card into a normal TV? Probably not much point though, I suppose you'd buy a proper 3D0 console for that really! Also, I seem to remember years ago my friend's 3D0 outputting surround sound, if I remember correctly he plugged some powered speakers into the headphone jack on the controller and set it to surround sound in the game (I seem to remember Need For Speed and maybe Road Rash having the option), and you'd get Dolby Surround. Presumably that works exactly the same on the 3D0 Blaster.
I don't think you could connect this directly to a TV but you could use a PC to TV converter to accomplish this. I have one from the 90s but it really hurts the picture quality.
Dolby Surround and similar technologies are tricks to get surround sound using normal stereo connections. Surround sound outputs like this are really just regular stereo outputs with specially mixed data. Since it is all software, it should work just fine on the 3DO blaster.
i wonder how the 3do card knows how to mask out the overlapping parts (the menus & mouse cursor). i guess there must be a special windows video driver that forwards that mask info to the card. curious that they couldn't derive the required sync signals from the VGA connector...
I seem to remember Windows having built in mask overlay support. I know MPEG accelerators and TV tuners worked on the same principle.
The VESA feature connector provides a full digital output of what is sent to the VGA connector, but with worse colors. When the card sees the key color it shows its own video and when it sees a different color it passes through the original, like a green screen.
I'm guessing the Feature Connector isn't just ensuring that the two sources are running at the same speed and resolution. But that it also jam-syncs the signals so that first line is the first line if every frame on both sources. Otherwise you have very little chance to get that sync going just by sheer luck when you insert that third source. The lines may be going the correct speed. But they'll be off-set so the image gets scrambled when combined.
Maybe a crafty technician could build something that can manually adjust the off-set. Like tracking on old vcr's.
Wait, no.... The vga cable itself could probably transmit the necessary sync signals. Hm... Dangit. Thought I had something there.