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Yesterday cards, any use today?

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Rauli

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Sep 16, 2013
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Hi! Yesterday I received a Creative PCI card which turned out to be a DVD decoder. It can't display graphics on its own. It requires a VGA, connecting both cards, installing drivers (for nothing else than Windows 95), selecting the right IRQs and using a custom application (again, just for Windows 95) to get at the ouput a mix of the image from the VGA and the movie.

I wonder if these kind of cards is of any use today. I have some old computers, and I like to make them work, but it makes no sense to use them to play a DVD. On a modern computer you can can use a media player instead, and that's it, no need for decoder card.

That made me think about some types of card that were used and still can be plugged in old computers but for one or other reason can't be used (or I can't find a good reason to use them).

DVD decoders.
TV tuners (analog TV tuners).
Modems (for basic telephone line).
Teleconference cards.

Could you find any good reason to use them? Or just to keep them? Or the best thing you can do is to recycle some of their componentes? Which ones?
 
I assume the card you obtained is a Creative DXR-2 or DXR-3. These cards are ideal for playing DVD versions of games like Wing Commander IV and Tex Murphy: Overseer.
 
It is a DXR3. But, is not possible to play those games (much smoother) in modern hardware? Or is it really required to setup a W95 machine with this kind of card and all the mess?

I mean: Setting up old machines, old OS's and old cards is great, but for certain tasks it doesn't make much more sense if you have to spend one day to get a worse experience than you would get with modern hardware immediately...
 
That's one reason I like DOSBox so much. But I don't use it just for games. I run plenty of old DOS apps with it too, e.g., word processor, credit card database, old floppy disk database, etc. In fact I have a copy of my tweener's HDD on my contemporary machine so that I can run just about anything that's on the tweener without having to fire it up.
 
Rauli said:
It is a DXR3. But, is not possible to play those games (much smoother) in modern hardware? Or is it really required to setup a W95 machine with this kind of card and all the mess?

I mean: Setting up old machines, old OS's and old cards is great, but for certain tasks it doesn't make much more sense if you have to spend one day to get a worse experience than you would get with modern hardware immediately...
Click to expand...
Hobbies don't have to make sence. If that were the case I wouldn't have bothered attempting to put my 286 online http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...08-Zenith-Data-Systems-Model-ZCV-251-EC/page4
 
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The older hardware will provide exactly the system the developers were expecting, no need to worry about bugs in the virtual machine implementation or background processes going haywire.

Classic tradeoff: more computers for better fidelity or fewer computers with emulation providing a close enough result. I like having both and then using whichever matches my current mood. Short games when I also want to check email: emulator. Leave me alone, I am finishing this game tonight, that is a task best given to real period hardware.
 
OK, so a DVD decoder can be used to play Wing Commander IV and some other games on old hardware.

Let's take next item in my list: Analog TV tuners. Provided that there are no analog TV stations left (at least where I live), could they be useful for some purpose?
 
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Rauli said:
Let's take next item in my list: Analog TV tuners. Provided that there are no analog TV stations left (at least where I live), could they be useful for some purpose?
Click to expand...

Yes, for doing video capture from old computers or game consoles which only have an RF output.
 
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