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Title
Media Pro HiRes
Manufacturer
Rombo
Appearance
2/3 length ISA card, 16 bit slot only
2 sets jumpers : 1 set for I/O address, 1 for IRQ enable
Connectors
External :
- Stereo audio out (3.5 mm jack socket)
- RCA mono audio in - not labelled
- RCA composite video out - not labelled
- S-video in
- VGA out socket (15w HD D sub)
Internal :
- MediaPro to VGA feature connector
- VGA internal plug (from VGA card output)
- VID2 (function unknown, possibly for secondary card [e.g. TV Tuner], not mentioned in
manual)
Installation
Hardware
The most awkward card to fit of those evaluated. Jumper setting was fairly straightforward, but mechanically fitting the card and its associated connectors did present a few difficulties:
- the output from the VGA card is taken via a lead (approx. 10") which goes from outside the PC to inside. This lead has to be fitted through the backplate hole (in the PC) and then connected to the card (the lead now being held in position on the cardÆs backplate with a grommet)
- there are two versions of the feature connector cable supplied: one plain lead and one incorporating fast buffering (on a daughterboard) for higher resolution/refresh graphics cards. For standard ISA SVGA cards this adapter might cause problems by effectively increasing the cards' thickness (>10mm). The PC used for these evaluations has a 4MB Diamond Stealth Pro PCI card fitted and its feature connector is on the opposite side to ISA card connectors and is the other way up as well û this means that the daughterboard, which would normally overhang an ISA card, sticks up above the PCI card by about 35mm. Fortunately this did not cause a problem with adjacent cards or case clearance on our (mini-tower) machine but is certainly something to watch out for. Just to make things a little more interesting û pin 1 on the Diamond card (the graphics display card) is not marked nor is it shown on the diagrams in the manual.
Software
This card comes with a range of software :
- Video for Windows (for full motion video capture)
- VGA Buster û allows VGA output to RGB PAL monitors/TVs from supported VGA chipsets (via
- optional VGA-RGB « SCART lead)
- Windows image capture and manipulation, with a variety of special effects
- TWAIN driver for TWAIN aware applications
Once the hardware installation has been performed the software will need to be set up. This means setting the I/O address to the same setting as that on the jumpers and setting the buffer address (for the on-board 1MB RAM). This defaults to 13 but if your PC has 16MB or more fitted (we have 32MB) this may cause problems û there is a special memory driver incorporated (v2 and later) but this is not guaranteed to work on all systems.
At this point the evaluation came to halt as no image from our video source could be seen - a number of checks were carried out but to no avail. We then contacted the company and explained the problem and the attempts made to solve the problem. Unfortunately, although they were helpful, there were no suggestions they could make beyond what we had already tried.
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