![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Older cards sometimes had this connector in a edge card form. Here is my Tseng Labs ET4000 card with its vesa feature connector highlighted which is where you would connect your cable from the Reelmagic card to. Generally the cable ends in both a pin style and edge style connection so you can connect to video cards that use either style. The card works by connecting internally with your primary video card via a vesa feature connector located on the upper right corner of the card nearer the output jacks. The card has both a VGA output and a 1/4″ inch audio jack output port. The full Reelmagic cards can also go for quite a lot of money so weigh your needs. Since I already had a CD drive controller as well as a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 installed I felt the Lite version was a better buy. The CD lite card differs from the full version of the Reelmagic CD card by its lack of an IDE connector meant to connect to a CD drive as well as the lack of a pin header to attach an OP元 FM card which basically turns the card into a sound blaster compatible. It is a fairly long 16 bit ISA card meant to be installed alongside a primary video card. This is the Reelmagic CD lite from 1993 by Sigma Designs. (remember all images can be enlarged by clicking on them twice) Finally PC users were able watch actual full screen FMV videos on their PC at smooth rates and at acceptable quality.įirst were going to look at an older Reelmagic card which is also the card I used in all my testing. A card that was ment to install next to your primary video card and whose sole purpose was to decode Mpeg1 video and send it to your monitor. Many times FMV was also reduced to a small section of the screen to ease the burden on the CPU in much the same way one is able to reduce the visual play area in a game such as DOOM to increase frame rate. Enter the Reelmagic Mpeg decoder card. To allow the use of FMV on the less capable CPU’s of the time videos screens were often shot in fairly low and grainy quality. Compromises then were forced to be made as we entered the brave new world of Full motion video or FMV as it is often referred to. Video cards eventually helped with the task of decoding video as they did with 3d rendering but this was still years away. Decoding video was a hefty task for those CPU’s of yesteryear and many just were not powerful enough for the task. It’s a silly thing to ask gamers or those that stream their favorite movies off the internet these days but in the 1980’s and early 90’s it was a wonder to behold being done on a lowly 386 or even a 486. Imagine being able to play games in high quality at a smooth 30 frames per second and in full screen. ![]()
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