Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

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ebinsugewa
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Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

Post by ebinsugewa »

Hi all,

I have 2 Blasts linked together with the Versus kit. The kit and video work fine. However I'd like to capture video from the setup when I run tournaments on it. In the past I tried to use a JROK with no success. I was feeding the JROK directly from the video input pins that drive the Versus Kit splitter board. Any idea why this might've not worked?

I only use one of the VGA ports on the splitter board currently. Has anyone else gotten a working capture setup from this second port? I am planning to capture the output from the second port with a USB3HDCAP (https://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/ ... ~USB3HDCAP). Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

Thanks.
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Re: Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

Post by Asure »

ebinsugewa wrote:In the past I tried to use a JROK with no success. I was feeding the JROK directly from the video input pins that drive the Versus Kit splitter board. Any idea why this might've not worked?

I only use one of the VGA ports on the splitter board currently. Has anyone else gotten a working capture setup from this second port? I am planning to capture the output from the second port with a USB3HDCAP (https://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/ ... ~USB3HDCAP). Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

Thanks.
Are you capturing everything from the VGA?

The input for the vs kit is VGA level voltage, but the splitter board must surely amp this signal in order to boost it to a level for both monitors. Otherwise the video levels will likely be too low.
If you attach a third device to 'tap' into the video, the voltage level will drop.

Likely fix would be to amp the video signal, using a powered VGA splitter, pre-VS kit.
So the output from say, a naomi, into the 1->2 powered VGA spliter, then one of the outputs of the VGA splitter to a capture device, the other one to the VS kit.
ebinsugewa
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Re: Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

Post by ebinsugewa »

Hypothetically I would capture from the spare splitter port. I currently only use one of the ports - to feed video to the slave monitor. The master monitor does not use the splitter at all. I also should clarify in case it makes a difference: I would only ever be using this for 15k games.
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Re: Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

Post by kingpin »

@ebinsugewa Any updates on this? I've recently been looking into this myself. Particularly with a H2H/Side by Side Setup, I'd like to do the same thing.
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Re: Anyone have experience capturing from a Blast City Versus Kit?

Post by NoAffinity »

Hopefully this information is helpful. I’ve got a bit of experience capturing from arcade setups, both in the JAMMA arena (JROK v4.1, a handful of cheapy composite/s-video encoders, Gonbes 8200), as well as a more challenging effort to pull a/v from a Nintendo board (Donkey Kong 2-board stack), via a JROK v4.1.

First, I think that VGA connector on the BC is going to be problematic. It sounds like it is a proprietary solution that just happens to be using a standard DB-15 connector. Even if the pinout is identical to a standard VGA video connector, if the signal is 15khz, then any capture device is going to be looking for 31khz and won’t know what to do with the signal. So, it is very unlikely that you can pump 15khz through the BC link kit directly into a capture device's VGA connection and expect a good result.

As for your challenges with the JROK encoder, please provide more details. What was your configuration, what do you believe was going wrong, what things did you do to test and verify?

All that aside (although, I am still interested in more details) my best recommendation is intercepting the video signal from the JAMMA output of the game board. There are (2) solutions that I know of for this:

1) Get a JAMMA extender harness, and split the RGBS Ground and Power lines. Using a simple wire tap like this, then taking the lines to the JROK or other encoder will work fine:
https://www.mscdirect.com/browse/tnpla/ ... Ah778P8HAQ
You can even use quick disconnects on the split lines, to make the additional “non-native” hardware removable. You can also split the audio lines directly to a female RCA jack (positive to center pin, negative to outer sleeve) in order to get both audio and video out of your split lines.

2) Another option, which I’ve recently picked up to do the same thing with my Aero City cab, but haven’t gotten around to it yet: http://simplesolutiontech.tictail.com/p ... al-spliter. A bit cleaner and more elegant than the jamma harness solution. It has solder pads for RGBS Ground and power, to solder the connectors for JROK or other encoder directly to it, as you can see. For the audio portion, just solder leads for your female RCA jack to the appropriate pads on that splitter board.

Once you have your lines split, and you are properly feeding the JROK encoder or other encoder intended for this purpose (15khz to whatever standard capture/device input format) you should be good to go. However, some of the very inexpensive USB capture device just have crappy internal processing, and what they produce is terrible. I use a Anchor Bay VP20 (http://www.nemsworld.com/theater/vp20.pdf) that sits between all device video outputs and my capture device. I think it will be unnecessary for your purposes, but keep it in mind. Many TV’s, monitors, etc are very forgiving and will display the signal, whereas a capture device won’t like it. So, be prepared to test your output on as many input devices as you have available (TV’s, monitors, capture devices), to know that your configuration is good up to the point of the capture/display device.
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