fun PCI cards to fiddle with?

[hunterjwizzard]

Aside from the basics, video, network, and audio; what other kinds of PCI cards do you like to use?

 

[Plasma]

I had a PCI radio card back in the day. It was pretty terrible. I think it got one station without static, even with a decent antenna.

For several years I also had a "myth box" DVR stuffed full of analog TV tuner cards. Of course that was made obsolete by the digital TV transition. There are ATSC tuners now, but with nearly everything available via streaming it's kind of pointless.

 

[DougM]

I had a PCI radio card back in the day. It was pretty terrible. I think it got one station without static, even with a decent antenna.

For several years I also had a "myth box" DVR stuffed full of analog TV tuner cards. Of course that was made obsolete by the digital TV transition. There are ATSC tuners now, but with nearly everything available via streaming it's kind of pointless.

/thread hijack/

I still have a DTV capture box. It used to be a Win7 box with Windows Media Center until that finally gave up the ghost. Now I use NextPVR. I drag it out for the Olympics and the Oscars and the very rare sporting event. I hook it up to that giant antenna I still have strapped to my chimney.

Other than that you're basically right, there's not a lot of point.

It's funny how many task-specific PC's I have. You'd think I could just coalesce it all into 1 or 2 machines, but my brain doesn't seem to work that way.

/!thread hijack/

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I build task specific PCs too, its not weird.

I have a standalone capture box and a really nice capture card in one of my main systems. If I were to capture OTA stuff I'd need at least 1080p for it to be worthwhile.

Could use an older card to capture off a game console or something, though. Gotta see what I've got in the bin. I'd love to find a card with full RCA in and pair it with some software that just displays the input.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I was able to catch a good price on an Adaptec ADC-2010 analog video capture card(with driver disk and manual!) which was exactly what I wanted(basic RGB-in) so that should be fun.

I have also got an old DVD decoder card I should load up.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

analog TV tuner cards

I got my first Hauppage WinTV PCI tuner card in the mid-1990's, and I really loved these things for a few years. By the early 'aughts you could get tunerless cards based around the chipset at the heart of these devices, the Brooktree BT8x8, generically known to Linux people as "bttv cards", for practically nothing. (At one point I paid... $25? at Fry's for a "webcam" that was a super cruddy NTSC camera powered off an inline dongle that attached to your PS/2 keyboard port paired with a tunerless BTTV card. The camera was useless, but the capture card was perfectly fine; could do both NTSC and PAL, and even had S-Video input.)

What was really cool about these cards is they used PCI bus mastering to directly shove pixels into an overlay buffer, so if you were just watching TV with them they consumed essentially zero CPU resources. Which means they work completely fine (again, for just viewing at least) on even the most gutless Pentium systems. Used to have one in a Cyrix 6x86 166+ running Slackware that I'd pretend was one of the UNIX SYSTEMs from Jurassic Park...

(They're not that great for actually *capturing* video streams longer than short clips, because they don't have any compression hardware on them. Some expensive cards included separate MPEG-2 encoders, but more typically you'd have to rely on having a very fast and low-latency hard disk system if you wanted to capture a long stream without dropping.)

Anyway. Obviously useless today, but if you want to play with stupid pet tricks like hooking a VCR or video game console up to a *very gutless* computer they might still be good for a laugh.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Anyway. Obviously useless today, but if you want to play with stupid pet tricks like hooking a VCR or video game console up to a *very gutless* computer they might still be good for a laugh.

Well the notion I always liked was using my computer monitor "as a TV" with the capture card, IE just as a display, but somehow still going through the PC instead of a switcher. I know its a weird thing to want but like I could hook my playstation up to the capture card and play on it while still watching TV on the TV(or vice versa). Having it run through the computer also meant I could still do things on the computer. The ADHD is real.

Obviously I have no need for such capability today between 9 monitors, PiP, and not actually playing console games anymore; but the desire to see it happen is still there.

I've actually got a good Hauppage card in the bin I may pull out for experiments. My only real gripe is they only had video in and relied on your sound card for the audio portion. Is entirely cosmetic and stupid, I know, but the idea of just having those RCA jacks did then and still does now feel really awesome.

Remember the eMachine eOne? That obvious iMac knockoff? I would have absolutely LOVED the TV tuner feature on that as a child. And hated everything else about it. But loved the tuner.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

but the idea of just having those RCA jacks did then and still does now feel really awesome.

So add RCA jacks? A fair number of sound cards from that era had internal AUX connectors the same as the CD audio plug, just chuck together a breakout from that to some RCA plugs mounted in a slot cover.

(I actually had one of those I didn’t have to make myself; my first PC sound card was a MediaVision Pro AudioSpectrum with onboard SCSI, and the kit came with a slot breakout with a 25 pin “Mac Style” SCSI port and stereo audio jacks for the external 1x CD-ROM drive. That dingus stuck around for almost a decade afterwards, providing audio plugs connected to newer sound cards and the SCSI breakout connected to a completely-overkill Adaptec 2940 driving a SCSI flatbed scanner.)

 

[Zare]

Apart that class of hardware - FM/TV/AV/Sat cards - is there anything else that's not a specialized industrial controller of something?
I'd like to bid around ebay for interesting PCI cards but I don't know what to search for.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

So add RCA jacks?

Teenage-me didn't have the money or the modding skills. Fortunately Adult-me has both!

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Apart that class of hardware - FM/TV/AV/Sat cards - is there anything else that's not a specialized industrial controller of something?
I'd like to bid around ebay for interesting PCI cards but I don't know what to search for.

The only other thing I know of is DVD decoders. But that's why I started this thread, hoping someone else has some thoughts.

 

[Hak Foo]

If your board isn't deluxe with onboard code readers, a PCI POST card could be interesting. I recall buying one like this (http://www.qiguaninc.com/met/producten/producten119_en.html) which promised a bunch of additional diagnostic data, which came with a little booklet to decode the additional four-digit codes it generated, but it never seemed that useful in practice, and seemed to no longer register codes in the last board I had with PCI slots (an X370 board). The most amusing aspect of it was that the silkscreen announced a copyright date to 2023, which was several years in the future when I bought the card.

 

[Zare]

I think this one is a better choice for utility

PC Analyzer Diagnostic Post Card Motherboard by elecseller on Tindie

4-Digit PC Analyzer Diagnostic Post Card Motherboard Post Tester Indicator with LED Display for Desktop PC

www.tindie.com

ISA and PCI and it's internal which is better when doing diagnostics than having displays on breakout. But if you're building a case and you want to fill it up with peripherals and oddware, sure that one looks kind of neat.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

If your board isn't deluxe with onboard code readers, a PCI POST card could be interesting. I recall buying one like this (http://www.qiguaninc.com/met/producten/producten119_en.html) which promised a bunch of additional diagnostic data, which came with a little booklet to decode the additional four-digit codes it generated, but it never seemed that useful in practice, and seemed to no longer register codes in the last board I had with PCI slots (an X370 board). The most amusing aspect of it was that the silkscreen announced a copyright date to 2023, which was several years in the future when I bought the card.

I think this one is a better choice for utility

PC Analyzer Diagnostic Post Card Motherboard by elecseller on Tindie

4-Digit PC Analyzer Diagnostic Post Card Motherboard Post Tester Indicator with LED Display for Desktop PC

www.tindie.com

ISA and PCI and it's internal which is better when doing diagnostics than having displays on breakout. But if you're building a case and you want to fill it up with peripherals and oddware, sure that one looks kind of neat.

How widely compatible are things like this? Its definitely an interesting device, but could I expect one to work in any system with PCI slots, or does it only work with a narrow range of motherboards?

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I do have a quite interesting device from the PCI-E world that I wish I could get a PCI version of. Its not actually a peripheral card per-se, but this little device sits in a 1x PCI slot and connects between your case power button and motherboard. Then it has a little low-power wifi dongle and connects to the Internet of Things. You can turn your computer on remotely with a cellphone app.

It is very dumb but I also never could make Wake on LAN correctly. If I ever get to build my planned garage datacenter this will be useful alongside remote PDUs.

 

[powerlot]

How widely compatible are things like this? Its definitely an interesting device, but could I expect one to work in any system with PCI slots, or does it only work with a narrow range of motherboards?

Yes, they work with anything 286 and newer that puts out POST codes. I had one in a recent Asus mainboard (6th gen Intel) because I was too lazy to connect anything and wanted to check if it lives.
Other "fun" PCI cards:
- SCSI controllers with things like tape drives, Jaz, scanners
- PCMCIA adapters
- GBIP/HPIB controllers, if you have test equipment
- MPEG/DVD decoders for older systems

 

[NeXT]

I have a number of what was at one time very high-end Canopus video boards for digitizing. Almost everything was accelerated locally in hardware with your choice of a front panel for I/O or an external box.

 

[Canned Noodles]

I saw CPU Galaxy on YouTube using a PCI card that displays the frequency of the PCI bus. It probably has limited use cases outside of overclocking

 

[hunterjwizzard]

- PCMCIA adapters

This raised somewhat bitter memories as I have an entire box of PCMCIA-to-PCI adapters(including front-panel adapters, back panel, etc) that somehow survived The Great Hardware Purge when I threw away a Voodoo5. I kept these stupid things.

Anyway, I have the same problem with PCMCIA as I do regular PCI - aside from basic staples, I can't find anything interesting to do with the standard.

I have a number of what was at one time very high-end Canopus video boards for digitizing. Almost everything was accelerated locally in hardware with your choice of a front panel for I/O or an external box.

Those things are pretty high on my wishlist. I was very much into videography in highschool and used to salivate over those. I remember you could even get ones that came with a fully-functional copy of Adobe Premier back in the day.

 

[NeXT]

This Canopus board supposedly came with a plugin for Premiere. Of course I don't have a CD for it but this was for a brief period how it was done and boy, did it occasionally limit what you could do.
I got another Pinnacle board that's similar but a lot more cost reduced. The PCI card has two firewire ports and a break-out box for A/V in and out. I bought a few different styles of capture kits like this back when the market was flooded with everyone ditching their analog capture sets but as time went on I realized they are nearly impossible to fit more than one into any one computer because they are so resource demanding with weird software issues.