Streaming Setup, Iterated

31 Jul 2020

While playing “Rick Dangerous” during my first live stream, I did notice an interference in the video signal coming from my Amiga 1200. It did not look too bad, though, and I decided to worry about it later.

When I captured a video of installing “Die Kathedrale”, the interference became much more prominent:

I am not sure what causes this interference just yet, but at this point I am almost certain that it is caused by my current power supply. I will know for sure whether the power supply is the culprit when my Compact Amiga Power Supply Unit from Individual Computers arrives.

Regardless of whether I will be able to solve this video signal interference issue or not, I began to wonder whether it is a good idea to use the analog video output of my Amiga 1200 in the first place.

The Amiga’s Lisa chip produces a digital video signal that is converted to an analog signal for output. The Open Source Scan Converter converts this analog signal back to a digital signal for video capture.

All the while, though, I have a flickerfixer which takes the digital video signal right from the Lisa chip and makes it available through DVI.

So the question is: can I capture video from my Amiga’s DVI port?

I acquired a DVI-to-HDMI adapter for connecting my Amiga’s flickerfixer’s DVI output to my video capture device which required an HDMI connection. The result looked great:

I have configured my Amiga 1200’s Workbench to use a graphics resolution of 1280x512 (PAL:Super-High Res Laced). Games, though, use a much lower resolution. The same applies to a default Workbench setup. Here is a capture of the video signal that I got for a common low resolution:

This is, of course, not useful. I asked what was going on in the support forum for my Individual Computers Indivision AGA MK2cr flickerfixer and quickly got a useful response from its designer. All I needed to do was change the output mode of the flickerfixer for the Amiga’s low resolution from “800x600 60 Hz” to “1280x1024 60Hz”.

Here is a schematic of my new streaming setup: