Question about ScanDoubler and Mediator Video Card

[pan1k]

i'm going to be purchasing a Mediator for my A1200 soon. I'd still like my old games to work with my system. Will I need both a scandoubler and a PCI video card (Scandoubler for the games and PCI videocard for workbench) ? I have a pretty sweet 19" Sony Monitor that was given to me that i'd like to put to use soon.

[keropi]

yes, u will need those 2... you will also need a switch to make the AGA/RTG change...

see here what I did to my machine... http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=24421

[pan1k]

Ok this is why I am asking these questions. Why would I need a switch? I get that AGA is the the Amiga's built in graphics, RTG is Retargetable Graphics why would I have to switch between the two? Sorry i'm asking these questions, i've never built a towerized amiga before.

[x56h34]

pan1k wrote:
Ok this is why I am asking these questions. Why would I need a switch? I get that AGA is the the Amiga's built in graphics, RTG is Retargetable Graphics why would I have to switch between the two? Sorry i'm asking these questions, i've never built a towerized amiga before.

Voodoo will output RTG display only and Amiga RGB output (or a scan-doubler for that matter) will output the native displays only. If you'd like to view both displays on one monitor, you need some sort of a monitor switcher in order to pull this off, or two monitors.

[keropi]

it is simple... it is like having 2 graphics cards...
workbench uses the RTG card (in this case the vga on the mediator) as some games that have rtg option.
but if you plan to play whdload games, that "talk" to the amiga hardware directly, they will use AGA only, and there is no way to change that. so, you have your monitor plugged on the pci card, and you start a game that uses AGA, so u need to plug the monitor to the aga output, a scandoubler in this case, to see the game. so if you have a switch you press a button and it switches. if you have a dual input monitor you press it's button, and if you have a zorro based rtg that has a built-in automatic switch (like the picassoII, piccoloSD64) it makes the switch auto.
I hope you get the meaning of all these... :-)

[pan1k]

Makes perfects sense to me. Thanks for all the replies! Would a Bvision be able to do the switch automagically too?

[alexh]

Nope. There used to be this thing called an Automon, but they are like rocking horse poo.

If you get a dual input monitor you can switch manually, or perhaps "blank" one output and make it auto switch.

The best solution (in the UK dunno about USA) is to look into getting an LCD Television with VGA and RGB SCART inputs. They have scandoublers built in.

[Gav]

Yeah it is a pain in the ass all this screen mode stuff but anyways i use a monitor switch box which has a cable  from my voodoo and scandoubler....

It's also a pain when you buy a soundcard and use whdload games which of course switch off workbench.
Cheers

[keropi]

pain with soundcard? why? I just feed the paula to the line-n of the soundcard and it just works, switching to whdload does not mute it...

[Angus]

pan1k wrote:
i'm going to be purchasing a Mediator for my A1200 soon. I'd still like my old games to work with my system. Will I need both a scandoubler and a PCI video card?

Actually no. You need a graphics card (eg Voodoo3) to make the Mediator work at all I believe, but as for games you could simply buy a pci TV card and take the comp signal from the back of your 1200 and put it into the TV card, which would let you either run games in a window on Workbench or fullscreen.

The quality is less than using RGB of course, but if you use a decent quality (and short) cable, I think it gives a pretty good result. Its the method I use.

[keropi]

oh yeah, the TV-Tuner solution, the poor-man's scandoubler... crap quality though, because you only use the VHS input, plus the BT chipsets of the amiga supported tv tuners are not the best arround...
I wish I could use the phillips SAA71xx based cards, way better in quality...

[Angus]

keropi wrote:
oh yeah, the TV-Tuner solution, the poor-man's scandoubler... crap quality though, ...

I think "crap" is a bit harsh, its certainly not great quality but for the price of a TV card on Ebay you could afford to get one and decide if it was acceptable. I think I'm right in saying that external scandoublers don't give perfect colour, so even that maybe a slight compromise.

As I say though, buying a decent quality lead improved the result quite a bit.

[keropi]

ofcourse you can live with it, but if you compare it against the rgb output on a real amiga monitor, or a scandoubler vga output, then it is crappy... if it was a SVHS output then it would be far better, but vhs is the last in line... I have connected many consoles to the vhs/svhs inputs of my tv-tuner on pc, the vhs is blurry and suffers from color bleeding...

[Legerdemain]

...ok...

...just to get some things straight here...

1. You should be aware of the fact that there isn't even ONE single scandoubler available for the A1200 which is true 24-bit (not that I am aware of, at least). What does this mean? Well, that there is no way for you to properly display the AGA-screenmodes with the help of a scandoubler for the A1200 (the AGA will look like ECS/OCS and be everything but pretty).

2. S-VHS is not the same thing as S-Video. S-Video connectors do exist on some TV-cards that can be used with the Mediator. Aver TV-Phone is one. I don't see why this input couldn't be used together with an RGB -> S-Video converter. I would try it out myself right now if it hadn't been for me not having that kind of converter at hand at the moment.

3. The sad thing when using the TV-card to display the graphics isn't only that the quality of the picture is 'crap' (well, some could say that it is perfectly decent according to them, but it is still 'crap' and most probably worse than using the computer with an RF-cable connected to a decent TV-set), but also the fact that you most probably will have the update of the screen reduced to 25 or 30 FPS making everything that scrolls around scroll around VERY jerky. What am I trying to say here? Well, that it is very much a WORKING solution, but in the end it all comes down to what you demand from your solution.

4. It is pure hell to get some things to run in fullscreen when using the TV-card solution since once you start an OCS/ECS/AGA application your RTG-screen freezes and there is no way to make the TV-application to automatically realise when this happens and turn the window to fullscreen... so unless there is an delay available such as the once in WHDLoad (or one manually made with a script) it is pretty much impossible to get some things to run in fullscreen with this solution (once again, at least as far as I know). Non-WB-startable applications are out of the question, by the way, since this solution need WB to be running to work.

[keropi]

color matching and blur/bleeding colors are 2 different things. No matter what sd/ff you have, it will still kick the a$$ of a vhs input.
SVHS and S-Video INPUTS mean the same thing here (Greece) if it means something else there , I don't know...
Also does the rgb output of the a1200 provide the luminance and chrominance signals to create the S-Video signal?
and the jerkyness is a thing I forgot, it is valid and annoying.
On a pc one can use a prog like FLY2000TV to make the tv-card output 2x fps, (50 for PAL, 60 for NTSC) thus giving fluid motion (fly2000tv worked only on SAA71xx chips, but now later versions added BT878 support)