Great Hierophant wrote:
Capturing RGB now is easier than it ever has been. Two reasonably priced solutions are the Datapath E1/E1s cards, which on ebay can be purchased used for around $100, ...
Let's be real clear here about, i.e. talk reality and what the actual products are rather than shortened product names:
*
Datapath VisionRGB-E1S: around US$1000 new, if you're lucky you can find one
used on eBay on rare occasion for US$150, but more likely US$200+
*
Datapath VisionRGB-E2S: around US$1450 new, if you're lucky you can find one
used on eBay on rare occasion for US$550, but more likely US$600+
Relevant details best I can determine:
* Sellers of these cards are usually people in the medical industry offloading equipment due to downsizing.
* I have no idea what the drivers/interface looks like for these cards, what features they have (deinterlacing, scaling, aspect ratio tweaking, RGB depth/ordering, colour adjustment (this could be done elsewhere), etc.) as for whatever reason people using them almost never seem to demonstrate this.
The user manual gives no details. The best I've found
is this nebulous screen shot and
a specific part of this video but for a DataPath VisionRGB-E1, which is
a completely different card.
* Quite often the case mounting brackets on these cards is low-profile / half-height (intended for thinner PCs with less width/depth) and the sellers for whatever reason don't include the full-height bracket. Without the proper bracket, the card will sit loose in the slot/case and not be sturdy, i.e. will come out of the slot the instant you try and plug something into it.
You can find some example videos of captures with these cards on YouTube. What's amusing is that you pretty much can't find examples of "original" classic consoles (particularly the NES) being captured with them, only things like arcade JAMMA boards (understandable considering that they output RGB natively, and also tend to use weird horizontal scan rates) or "newer-ish" systems. I've only found a couple videos for SNES capture, and only one for Genesis/MD.
All that said:
Both of these cards are incredibly good capture devices, capturing at native resolution and frequency rate, and pretty much handle literally anything you throw at them. The cards are expensive as hell because they seem to be focused mainly on the medical industry (kinda like how Eizo monitors are often expensive for similar reasons). The usual buyers of them for retro capturing tend to be people who have a myriad of devices they want to capture, all with RGB output or RGB mods applied (please see my previous post), and not so much someone focusing on a single console. Hence I feel that if the only focal point is the NES, and if willing to give up use of a CRT, just buy an AVS and be done with it.