VLM… in colour, without frame skipping…

A while ago I bought a TV card for my laptop. The idea being I could connect my Nuon to my laptop and not need a crap NTSC converter or TV. Making the card work sufficiently well in Windows was a nightmare. It either dropped loads of frames, had poor audio output or randomly paused for no sane reason. Making the card work in Linux seemed quite hard so I gave it no more thought until last week when I was home.

After some help from the Video4Linux mailing list (like which card I should tell the driver I own) I had the card recognised, initialised and displaying random images and snatches of sound. It was crazy. I could plug my Playstation in, see the startup images and hear the sound, but as soon as something like Wipeout loaded the screen went black and that was it. If I then unplugged the video lead and wiggled it in its hole I could see random frames of video. Quite what was happening is beyond me, surely if it works with one game it should work with them all.

I’ve just now connected my Nuon to it and was greeted with glorious colourful NTSC and sound. Unlike Windows, the sound doesn’t skip, there’s no weird crackling sounds and the video doesn’t stop. Something’s not right if 3rd party drivers for an OS that isn’t supported by the manufacturer work better than the manufacturer’s own drivers for their only supported OS.

I am now “testing” the card some more

I could do the expensive and daft thing of buying an XBox360 to get Neon, but the XBox would have to become insanely cheap first. I think I’ll wait for the PC version of Neon to come out and see if my laptop can handle it. If not, by then I should be able to afford a new PC.

Tags: Game, Hardware, Linux, Windows, XBox