Our Windows 98 LAN Party History: How we setup dual VGA capture

This last incarnation of the Win98 LAN Party has been in the works for quite some time. It's been a goal of mine to setup a reliable method of capturing video for two VGA sources. I even built a computer dedicated to this specific purpose, but it didn't quite work out. This last weekend was, almost nearly, the first perfect Win 98 LAN Party stream. I thought how we got that setup might be interesting to read about.

First a little backstory though...

Win98 LAN Party Gen 1: The Beginning

This was an idea we had when I was visiting Druaga1 some time ago.  We hadn't done a complex video like this before. So to test the waters we just recorded at first and the game we tried was Unreal. Not the prettiest setup. But that seemed quite fun, so the next step was making it more complex. The next day we did a full setup with a camera(s) which was later edited and put up on Druaga1's channel, here's Pod Racer as an example(a really awesome game BTW). This setup worked for the duration of the time I was there but it had a lot of problems:

• Both computers were recorded via S-Video output on the graphics cards
• I didn't bring a mic and had to use a spare cheap headset
• We separately recorded video and audio files to later be edited into a released video
• The editing sucked hardcore

So while this looks good on the surface there were a lot of issues. The Voodoo3 3000 in The 98 Machine wont downscale the monitor video to S-Video from a resolution higher than 800x600 and gets picky at some lower resolutions. It also only has one VGA and one S-Video connector for it's output. My capture card had a significant amount of latency, so I had to deal with the Voodoo3's S-Video limitations to get my monitor to work. Druaga 1's video card, a GeForce FX 5200, had significantly more VRAM and could handle some better scaling(and game assets). Druaga1's capture card was also much faster and he was able to play off his capture monitor. Thus not needing to have a secondary video display. After doing all the recording we took note of how fun that was and decided the concept of the Win98 LAN Party would return.

Win98 LAN Party Gen 2: Going Live

After the nightmare of editing all the footage Druaga1 and I decided it would be best going forward that we only capture on one PC and have everything already synced and aligned in frame. Once that was decided it was a next logical step that the LAN party could then be streamed. So a new goal was set.

When planning the next Win98 LAN Party Druaga1 and I wanted to get away from S-Video to spare ourselves the video quality drawbacks and headaches of the GPU restrictions. Druaga1 ended up getting an Avermedia Game Broadcaster HD C127, a capture card with a native VGA input. I was determined to get a functional setup on Linux though and bought a BlackMagic Intensity Pro for it's linux drivers and low-ish second had cost. However, it only has HDMI for higher resolution input. Druaga1's card has Windows drivers and was very reliable. My card had hidden drawbacks that I didn't fully appreciate until I was too far into it(only specific wide screen resolutions and a max of 1080i@60). I wasn't convinced that I wouldn't be able to get Druaga1's C127 working in Linux. A while back I had bought parts for a Core 2 Quad computer with the intention of making it "The XP Machine" with SLI 9800GTs(and still will one day) but decided to re-purpose them as "The Stream PC". I got the BlackMagic card working in it with linux and the proprietary drivers.  I also threw in an older Hauppauge analog capture card and it had Just-Worked. 

So when we met up again for the next LAN Party I brought The Stream PC with the hope of throwing in the C127 and it magically working. This was not likely though, some company was even selling a custom driver at the time. So I also brought a VGA Passthrough to S-Video adapter as backup. Surprise, surprise, the C127 didn't work in Linux when we put it in The Stream PC. So Druaga1 captured his 98 computer directly from VGA but mine was still S-Video using a USB capture card.

As we were now streaming we had to make some changes to how we played and decided to rotate games when it felt like we hit a natural break. Before we were just playing until we were done with that game. That led to a lot of footage, so the new restriction made making videos easier. After going live several videos were put up, but there were still some problems:

• We somewhat forgot about in-game music and both games had music playing at times.
• The video for my computer still sucked
• Game setup problems delayed some games significantly
• Talking to viewers had no context in the videos after being live
  

The music problem was bad enough that I don't think all the games we played were able to be put up as videos because you can't hear much beyond the cacophony of sound.  So after this we took more notes and had a new resolve to make the stream even better next time.

Win98 LAN Party Gen 3: Got Gudder

This time we were serious. We were close to a winning formula last time so there wasn't as much to change for the next LAN Party. I bought my own C127 with the sole intention of putting it in Druaga1's computer for streaming. Thus solving the S-Video problem forever. Just in case though I did email kernellabs about their supposed C127 linux driver only to be told this:

I bet people are just beating down their doors over bulk licenses for a discontinued niche product for a niche OS...

Anyway, now that we had two VGA capture cards things should be easier right? Well you see, Druaga1's GeForce FX 5200 has VGA and DVI outputs. So he can easily clone his display. I however, am still rocking the Voodoo3 (3DFX for lyf3) so I was still limited to one VGA output. Now to make this more interesting I had already invested in some VGA and HDMI converters because I thought the BlackMagic card was going to be great. So I was flush with those but had nothing that was only VGA. So in order for me to see my video and capture I needed to split the VGA signal. Now a single active VGA splitter would have worked, but I already owned enough hardware to technically be able to do it. So I setup this adapter mess to make it work:

And that is exactly how we ended up doing the streams. To add a wildcard into the mix though, the VGA->HDMI adapter didn't support anything below 640x480. So some older games didn't cooperate and I never saw POST.

The Audio setup wasn't much better. Before the S-Video capture cards also had RCA audio in, so we just used those. But now we had to do two mics and two line in's to get all the audio we need. This proved to be problematic as we maxed out OBS' audio inputs. We were able to work around it though be using desktop capture and listening to one of the audio tracks. 

That's video and audio now taken care of, now to tackle the remaining problems. The chat was embedded in the video giving context to what we said after the fact. One unforeseen problem with that though was the significant number of people in chat making it difficult to keep track at times. We weren't able to respond to that many people. We also decided before hand that since I was using speakers I would have the music playing. That way both of us could hear it but not have it be duplicated in the stream. 

Even with all that prep we still had problems on both streams. For the first stream on Twitch we forgot to setup games beforehand and live installed them. Thankfully there weren't any issues along the way, so this was an extremely minor inconvenience. For the second stream we did install everything the day before, and even tested some of the less likely to work games. But when we started the stream on Youtube my audio mixer decided that it was going to buzz the whole time. We had tested this rigorously before so it was disappointing to have an issue live. We had to cut my game audio in the end. So we learned:

• Still need to install before streaming
• Hardware audio mixing 
• Test account for going live to check everything one last time

The recordings from these streams aren't up just yet but they can be expected to come out on Druaga1's channel in the future.

Win98 LAN Party Gen 4: The Final Frontier

Whatever our next setup ends up being for the LAN Party stream, I suspect it will be the final hardware setup. I want to look into an HDMI scaler for the BlackMagic card I have to make any video source work with it. I may also get a used BlackMagic 4k card as well as it supports 1080p@60 and that would get me two linux capture cards. Even though my VGA->HDMI adapter has drawbacks I would get another one of those for the second input.

I totally spaced on using hardware mixers for all the audio this last time. One mixer could easily do two line level and two mic inputs. So that won't be a problem next time.

But X-streamer makes this look so easy?

Money solves all problems with these. In an ideal world where we could justify spending unlimited funds on this I would just buy two AVIO 4Ks and two Framemeisters and call it done. But you're looking at a $2000 investment for that kind of hardware. If we were doing the LAN party as our primary content that could make sense. But since it's a once a year event right now the numbers don't add up. Druaga1's setup is easy since he isn't using a Voodoo card and just needs the C127, which he bought new. So his setup was only about $150. I've got everything for my setup used over long periods of time. I've only spent around $200. So even if you add up both of our capture setups we haven't spent enough to add up to any one piece of the ideal setup. 

I hope that was an interesting look behind the scenes. We've been at this for 3 years now and don't plan on stopping anytime soon. One of these days I'll look into a hardware VPN solution and we can expand this to include Windows 98 WAN Parties so we can do this more frequently. But that's a problem for another day.