mediator or scan doubler?

[Daedalus]

rayt wrote:
I havent tried it out, but I think I have read somewehre that if you have a tv card in your mediator, you can connect the aga output  to the tv cards input port and display it in a wb window. I doubt this will work with non system friendly games/applications though.

This does work, but only to a point. Yes, if you run a non-system-friendly game, the workbench freezes, but the TV card accesses the video ram of the Voodoo without the system, and so keeps updating even when the OS has shut down and the AGA chipset takes over. But this does require that:

a) The game can be run from workbench with all the add-ons and patches enabled (Quite a few won't and only work with a bare install)

b) The game doesn't try to switch screenmodes in a system-legal way when it starts up. This will cause the TV window to try to close and it won't update then.

I personally have both, bought the scandoubler when I encountered the problems above. I use both of them with a monitor switchbox (and my PC and Mac ). But yeah, definitely get the Mediator and MMCD, and have a telly nearby for the times you need AGA until you can sneak a scandoupler in past the wife

[rayt]

This does work, but only to a point. Yes, if you run a non-system-friendly game, the workbench freezes, but the TV card accesses the video ram of the Voodoo without the system, and so keeps updating even when the OS has shut down and the AGA chipset takes over. But this does require that:    a) The game can be run from workbench with all the add-ons and patches enabled (Quite a few won't and only work with a bare install)    b) The game doesn't try to switch screenmodes in a system-legal way when it starts up. This will cause the TV window to try to close and it won't update then.

Thats more than I expected. It should run great with all the whdload games.  Maybe I´ll buy a cheap tvcard for my mediator now that I know this  :-D

[Cass]

A GFX card is a must! I personally have a CV3D with its scandoubler module and it`s wonderful :-)  Other cards that support the same config are PicassoIV and CV64 (both offer a scandoubled amiga video).

The only reason that I don`t get a mediator is  that I don`t want to lose the scandoubled video (common VGA/RGB-out, you need just one cable to the monitor, no switchers etc.)
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Vapor Genie

[CRL]

Hi All-
For a long time I solved my flicker problems with a C20284 slow phosphore monitor.  Gave good high res flicker free NTSC and mild flicker in PAL.  When that burned out I bought a scan doubler/FF and pluged it into an old VGA monitor.  This gives a very solid NTSC, but distorted PAL.  Sounds from the above like a Picasso would give me faster better service.  However, how much do I gain from a graphic card plugged into a zorro 2 slot in my A4000 (040@50mhz)?  And would I need a new Buster to run the graphics card in zorro3?  I'm pretty happy with the graphic speed (GUI feels faster than my windows 1.3 mhz machine at work), except that I can't play the movie clips on my amidos 3.9 disk at full speed.  Bumping the CPU up from 25 mhz to 50 mhz didn't help frame rate much at all, so I'm thinking the bottleneck is in AGA.  Could I get where I want to be with an older cheaper card like the spectrum?  Any thoughts based on experience will be wecome.
Yours-
CRL

[Cass]

There is a dramatic speed increase with a GFX card. I remember when I had to switch back to RGB out when I had to send my monitor for service... It was a traumatic experience! I couldn't stand the slow window refresh, or text update. Imagine that I was on an AGA  060&PPC Amiga, maximum speed and even used some old hacks (of my pre-gfx card era) to accelerate the OS's gfx routines.
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Voyeur Sports