On Dec 12, 2011, at 11:18 AM, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
Or you can get
a TV card for a PC for under $20. Most of them work nicely with Linux and all of them
work with Windows, though the actual viewing applications get a bit ugly. There are USB
equivalents (such as EyeTV) which work nicely with the Mac as well, but they're a bit
more pricy.
would this also work with a c64?
Well, yes... anything with a composite output (some modern input cards lack antenna inputs
for composite, since it's basically obsolete, but try finding an older one; I've
found bt848/878-based cards to work just fine for playing video games, and they work great
with Linux. CX2388x-based cards are a nice step up, and can still be found relatively
cheaply.
Be warned that some newer devices (possibly including the converter box I linked, I've
never tested it) may balk at the signals coming from older machines. For example, my old
roommate had an A/V receiver that wouldn't even lock on the signal from an Apple ][ or
an old NES because the signals weren't strictly to spec, while my newish LCD TV sort
of accepts them but with a lot of problems. The older analog TVs have no such problem
because of the loose tolerances to which they were designed (ah, the joys of analog).
If you have the option of S-Video output (SNES/N64 have this, and I think the C64's
graphics chip has a luma/chroma output that could probably be adapted to S-Video, but I
don't have one so I couldn't say) you will get a MUCH better picture simply
because the process of combining the luma and chroma signals into a composite signal is
very difficult to reverse well (especially for NTSC).
- Dave
- Dave