pouët.net

Hei hei,

I post this here in the hope that I will got this problem solved once and for all - and hopefully the solution will be applicable for other machines too -.

I'm an Oric coder (yeah I know...), and the fate of an Orician is to keep having his demos shown on an emulator because:
- only very few people has orics
- it is impossible (so far) to get an oric connected to a party video projector due to the weird video output of this machine.

The consequences of this is that:
- Since the demos are presented on emulators on PC we can't do any "screen synchronized" effect, everything looks jerky, colors and definition is quite different from a TV screen, and the infamous "this demo is beeing shown on an emulator" already got us to loose some points in party voting :-/
- People that want to watch our demos are obliged to install an emulator, learn to use it, and unfortunately Orics emulators are having more and more troubles with modern hardware and OS, so they refuse to work sometimes (no -or very bad- sound, no video, or crash).

So the solution will be to find a way to convert the weird Oric signal in something that can be connected to a video projector, VCR, PC aquisition card, etc...

I don't know who here is knowledgeable in video circuitry, but all I can say is that trying to connect an oric to a video projector or DV camera has been tried for hours in many parties, including "Very Important Party", "Alternative Party", "State of the Art 1", "Little Computer People", ...

The thing is that the Oric has absolutely no composite output, it is just pure RED/GREEN/BLUE/SYNC/GROUND output in 50hz. If you know anything that can accept this, or any kind of scandoubler/vga box that could output a decent signal, just tell me !

I would so much like to see an oric demo runing in a party on a real machine instead of emulator, or being able to create AVI/MPG videos so everybody here can see them :(

Thanks for any help/suggestion.

what about the handmade oric->scart video connector mentioned on your homepage? do you have something like that or know someone who could solder it?

this whole din cable/pin layout sounds custom to me, i doubt there's stock hardware that accepts it. but if you can manage to get a stable video signal out of it, even with a bit of quality loss, and even with nonconforming signal levels, chances are very very good that you'll be able to produce a decent capture. at breakpoint we typically use a sony dsc-1024 as "processing step" between weird hardware and our pretty standard dv capturing equipment, because most "standard" capturing hardware (VCRs, DV cams, etc.) can only work with "proper" signals, while the dsc-1024 eats pretty much anything you throw at it.

so far we've been able to record anything that spits out something like a PAL/NTSC/VGA signal with that, and in very good quality - including nonstandard sync modes and signal levels (like a dreamcast running at 60hz PAL).

as said, IF you can get a PAL/NTSC/whatever signal out of that, you should be able to do good video captures with that kind of setup (however, rental prices for good quality video equipment are far from cheap, easily 150 EUR/day and more).

at the pmp and outline parties, we use(d) a samsung sv215x vhs recorder to hook up several PAL(-ish) videosignals to the beamer. somehow this bottom-of-the-range vhs from 1997 manages to convert every signal i've fed it to a signal that no beamer so far has refused, including other non-modulator machines like atari stf for example. only downside is that it's mono... but that's not really an issue for our purposes, a few extra wires do the job too.

what is an atari stfu? :P

here's a picture of me & my STFU:

and the black thing is an Atari BBQ?

Dbug: I can only second ryg - the Sony DSC-1024 is the best friend of anyone having to fillde with weird video signals. Even if it's still expensive it spares you a lot of hassle, and if you combine it with a DV cam or DV converter box, you get video in almopst perfect quality into your PC.

And I don't see why soldering an Oric->VGA cable (with red,green,blu,CSync and ground) and connecting this to a DSC-1024 shouldn't work. I'd definitely go for it.

Concerning the scart schematics on my site, well it's just good enough to get a very crap picture. I tried at VIP 2, and yellow was brown, blue was nearly black, ... good enough to get a display on screen, but not good enough to get the colors rights: you get better results using an emulator in such a situation :-/

Well, basicaly the oric is just output a VGA signal at 50hz verticaly instead of 60hz, and with half the horizontal frequency, so if your sony something accepts this, well, why not :)

I think that most beamers are stupid. They assume that if it's >60hz then it's some kind of VGA, else its some video :'(

I wonder if things like the old scan-doublers that were used to connect amigas to VGA screens could be adapted to work with such signals ?

well if the colors are right but not equally balanced (or just too dark) it should't be too hard to construct an analogue amplifier with just a few transistors, resistors and other simple electronics...

but I'd go with the VCR if that's possible