RealMagic Rave: MPEG plus Windows Accelerator
RealMagic Rave: MPEG plus Windows Accelerator
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): Oops, I messed up again. In this column last
Monday I wrote that the MO disk cartridge was backed with a five
year warranty from Sony. Obviously I had confused it with another
product, as Sony dealer in Jakarta reminded me that the cartridge
as well as the drive carried only a one year warranty. Sorry for
the error.
Now let's have a look at a different product category: MPEG
playback and Windows accelerator cards. Last Jan. 23, I reviewed
two MPEG playback cards -- ReelMagic Lite and MPEG Master. Around
that time, Sigma Designs, the Fremont-based company that made
these ReelMagic boards, started to change the name of their
products to RealMagic. I was able to take home and test drive one
of its latest offerings, RealMagic Rave, last week. It falls into
the category of MPEG plus accelerator cards.
Accelerator
I believe by now you've become pretty familiar with MPEG as I
discussed MPEG in some length in my Jan. 23 article. An
accelerator, in a nutshell, is a card with a processor that takes
over the burden of handling graphic images -- particularly
Windows GUI -- and writing them to the display monitor from the
CPU. This leaves the CPU free to do other things and the overall
performance of the system increases. Of course, a Windows
accelerator card is one that has been optimized for Windows GUI,
and it usually comes with its own memory.
More expensive accelerator boards come with Video RAM, or
VRAM. VRAM is fast but, as I've just said, is also very
expensive. On the low end there are boards with Dynamic RAM, or
DRAM. DRAM is slow, but, as you can easily guess, is much less
costly than VRAM.
The amount of VRAM or DRAM available in an accelerator card
determines two aspects. First, the number of colors that you can
have displayed simultaneously -- referred to as "color depths".
Second, the level of display resolution. Normally, with 1 MB VRAM
or DRAM, you can display 256 simultaneous colors at the
resolution of 1024 by 768. This is the level of color depth and
pixel resolution I usually use in preparing the accompanying
illustration for my articles.
Rave
With most MPEG cards, you still need a VGA card on your
system. With Rave, it's no longer necessary as it replaces the
VGA card. It's also a VL-Bus card. The manual states that the
minimum system requirements are a 486SX 25 MHz, 4 MB RAM, 2 MB
hard disk space, and a CD ROM with at least single-speed and XA,
Mode 2, Form 2 capabilities. You see, the requirements have
already moved up from the 386SX for ReelMagic Lite to 486SX. But,
taking into account that you wouldn't be able to find a machine
with VL-Bus slots at the CPU levels below 486SX, this requirement
is understandable.
The version I tested came with 1 MB DRAM -- not VRAM. It was
priced at about Rp 1 million. The accelerator processor chip used
is Trident. At the regular VGA 640 by 480 resolution, the card is
capable of displaying 16 million colors at the 60 Hz refresh
rate.
The card had a VESA Advanced Feature Connector, or VAFC. Using
this connector, you can add an NTSC or PAL digitizer/TV tuner to
your system and connect these two cards together. With this kind
of setup, you'd be able to watch a TV broadcast and play a
VideoCD at the same time in two separate, side-by-side windows.
In case they have to overlap, the bundled software lets you
decide to move either the TV broadcast or the MPEG playback
window to the foreground.
Installation
The first time I started the computer after swapping my ATI
Graphics Ultra Pro with Rave, everything seemed to be working
smoothly. I installed the software, device drivers and the
utilities on the hard disk using the Standard option. The
installation software automatically set the IRQ to be 9 and DMA
12. However, when I tried to run the DOS-based RealMagic VideoCD
Player, the program loaded but refused to playback anything. Then
I ran Windows and tried to start the Border Adjust utility, which
is necessary to ensure optimal display. The utility also refused
to work, and I was told to run Setup once again. I had vainly
tinkered with most o the options in the utilities for more than
an hour before I decided to try altering the IRQ interrupt call.
I changed it to 12. Bingo! It worked, finally.
CD Station
New to RealMagic is the Windows-based CD Station program.
Unlike the old ReelMagic Lite software, you no longer have to
rely on Windows' native Media Player. You can see the screen-shot
of RealMagic CD Station in the accompanying illustration. This
program allows us to play different kinds of recordings including
VideoCD, Karaoke CD and audio CD.
On the bottom left panel of this program, which closely
resembles the real VCR, there are buttons that let you maximize
the window size, display playback counter, invoke a dialog box in
which you can create a list of tracks for the CD Station to play.
There is also a sliding button that lets you adjust the volume.
To modify the balance setting of the stereo audio channels,
however, you'd have to run RealMagic Mixer. On the bottom right
panel there are standard CD control buttons, such as Play, Pause,
Forward, Reverse, Skip to the next or previous track, Stop and
Eject. We can also play tracks in a random order or sequentially.
The last button on the bottom right panel is something that
I've just found. It captures the displayed video frame in the
viewing window and saves it in a .BMP format. This was the button
that allowed me to capture the frame displayed in the
accompanying illustration. An ordinary screen capture utility,
such as Hijaak Pro, wouldn't be able to capture the moving video
frame, it can only capture the window borders and leave the
viewing window blank.
By the way, the displayed frame was captured as I was playing
one of my favorite Nana Mouskouri's songs from a Karaoke CD.
On the fly
Now let's go back to the windows accelerator part. The Windows
Screen Control utility lets me adjust a lot of things, including
screen resolution and the number of colors I want. You can see
the dialog box in the illustration. Each time I changed the
settings, I had to reboot before the changes took effect.
However, the utility allows me to change the screen vertical
refresh rate on the fly -- I don't have to reboot. The screen
flickers for a couple of seconds and then becomes normal again.
That's neat. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Rave is
capable of giving us a 75 Hz refresh rate at the 1024 by 768
resolution. My Graphics Ultra Pro is capable of only a 70 Hz
refresh rate at that level of resolution. The higher the refresh
rate is, the kinder the display screen is to our eyes.
Advanced features of the screen control software allows you to
customize your virtual screen, which allows a display area larger
than the actual screen. Using the mouse or specified hot keys,
you can pan around this area through the actual screen.
Weaknesses
For some unknown reason, there was unsightly reversed shadows
on the display monitor. The problem lessened a little when I used
larger Windows fonts. The screen looks like a piece of white
paper full of eraser marks. It could be slightly disturbing when
working on image manipulation, but for most ordinary jobs it
wouldn't matter very much. I haven't figured out what causes it.
In the Windows-based CD Station there is no slow-motion
function. That's a little bit surprising because the DOS-based
VideoCD Player has this function. On the other hand, the DOS-
based player doesn't have the function for capturing a frame.
There are no audio enhancements such as bass and treble
adjustments. Perhaps the people at Sigma Designs think it's
better to leave these features to the makers of sound boards.
Finally, although it has device drivers for non-Windows
applications, such as AutoCAD, old versions of Lotus 1-2-3, GEM
Desktop and Windows NT, it doesn't have a device driver for OS/2
Warp. It's rather surprising, given the fact that this operating
system is rapidly gaining popularity.
Standard
Sigma Designs' RealMagic has become the de facto standard in
the MPEG world, therefore I need not comment further. For the
accelerator part, as it uses DRAM instead of VRAM, Rave by no
means deserves to be called Speed Demon. Although it is fast
enough for most purposes, this card is no competition for high
end cards from ATI, Diamond or Hercules.
However, it does offer a set of features that are on par with
those belonging to the more expensive products, such as virtual
screens, high refresh rates, and Display Power Management
Signaling (or DPMS -- which I couldn't test as my Sony monitor
didn't support this feature). Combining the MPEG playback card
with an accelerator also gives one more benefit, you are able to
save one VL-Bus slot. With all its capabilities, this board
definitely beats having both the regular VGA card and a separate
MPEG decompression board in your PC.