Sweetspot / PMS PDI Delux Screenshots

[Tobio]

http://www.arav45.dsl.pipex.com/comparison1/index.html
Here we go, my first ever webpage!  A small (for now) gallery of screenshots from my Sweetspot video processor.

The card goes by two names, Sweetspot in the UK and PDI Deluxe in the US, but they are the same card.  What drew me to it is that it has RGB inputs, so I can hook up all my consoles in good quality at last, and I can also hook up RGB only devices like...  arcade PCBs :-D

I plan on adding more pages.  I have two in the pipeline already, one with short video captures (cropped close ups) of gamecube component video vs. gamecube composite.  You can't really gather how much better the picture is from stills, you have to see the noise (on composite input) to really understand.

The second page I want to put up is of some captures of the glitches I get in some PS1 games, and most Saturn games.  It is hard to describe, but the video goes funky on the even scanlines only, and my old cheapo capture card never used to do it.  To add to the confusion this only seems to happen in certain games and video modes.  saturn 60fps games are alright, but normal 30fps standard res - like the booting up graphics are messed up.  This may be fixable with drivers and stuff though, and I can get a perfect picture if I display the odd scanlines only, so I'm not too concerned at the moment.

Please leave feedback on this thread with anything you would like to see put up.  I have a fair number of consoles so I can try to perform things on request.  I am getting to grips with this whole HTML business now, but I feel total sympathy with Lawrence and the site updates.  This stuff takes time to do properly, especially for a learner like me.

[Guest_Martin]

Erm; are these screen shots from the card from captured video or direct from the card input?
It's just... they looks a little over compressed...

[Guest]

the pictures on the left are the captured ones, they are compressed  and resized jpegs, but if you click them you can download a zip file that contains the actual .bmp screen capture.  

Fraps captures the video overlay layer, rather than what you see on screen so those bitmaps are 720x576, and contain a little garbage at the edges that you wouldn't ordinarily see.  Also to complicate matters Dscaler handles one field at a time, so you will for example only see one persons shadow at a time, but I also think that the emulator screencapture does that too.

the right hand side are the .png files that the emulator generates in screen capture mode (F8), these are at 304x288 (or whatever the neogeo native resolution is) and are there as a reference "perfect" source.

to do a proper comparison you will have to download the bitmaps, and compare them to the .png files zoomed in using whatever picture program you like.

[atom]

I don't want to put down you or your card cuz you seem to be pretty excited over it. I have to say, that I would never be able to guess that you were using RGB, it looks verry blurry. Look at all the lost detail in the 4th pic.

[NFG]

I was quite impressed by the clarity of this card.  My RGB card is quite crappy in comparison, and I paid a lot more.  =(

[Endymion]

I don't want to put down you or your card cuz you seem to be pretty excited over it. I have to say, that I would never be able to guess that you were using RGB, it looks verry blurry. Look at all the lost detail in the 4th pic.

He did mention he is using DScaler. DScaler is used to deinterlace an interlaced broadcast. I know jerkwads who swear by DScaler with an S-video input. And I think it looks like garbage. You can still see the jags.

[Tobio]

I by no means think this card is perfect, but what is the alternative?  composite or svideo...(yes...   using a real arcade monitor)

The fact that I can even put my neogeo straight into it means I can forgive it for a lot of things.  I'm going to move the card into a better PC to do more comparisons.  I have taken video captures of gamecube using both Nintendos Component lead, and Nintendos composite lead, you can see a great difference, but my PC is not fast enough to capture without dropping frames.  When I have some reasonable video grabbed I will put it up in the same way.  (its in a 733mhz P3 at the moment im going to move it into an athlonXP 2500 hope that improves things)

Unfortunately I don't have many s-video leads for my consoles, one I do have though is dreamcast, but no scart lead.  I will try and find one somewhere because comparing s-video to rgb would be a very good comparison to make.

Another point in the card's defence is that when you are using Dscaler the picture doesn't look exactly like the capture.  first of all it fills the screen, and secondly you can turn on filters and adjust channels and things to improve it.  In the captures I took, all that is turned off (mainly cos it slows down my PC).

In the pipeline I have gamecube component vs composite comparison,
dreamcast s-video vs RGB - as soon as I can find a scart lead
please post more suggestions. Thanks