After literally taking four hours to drive home in this afternoon's New Jersey snow storm for a trip that usually takes me around one hour, I didn't expect much from my night-time activities. My curiosity got the best of me, however, as a second cheap video capture solution came today, a Cardbus TV Card, to go along with my oft-talked about Adaptec GameBridge TV USB adapter. I was very curious if this new solution would give me the results I was after - capturing those systems that the GameBridge had trouble getting a sync on, like the Apple II and Panasonic JR-200U. After having the seller e-mail me the contents of the CD-ROM that he forgot to include, I was able to install the card to my trusty Gateway Tablet PC and after I looked up a registration code for the included InterVideo WinDVR 3 (turns out the registration code was in the zip file after all), I was in business. Or so I thought. Long story short, after multiple cable variations and going back to my usual InterVideo Home Theater application, I was getting the same scrambled result I was getting with the GameBridge, and in fact in some cases getting less of a result. After spending way too much on this, I was about ready to give up, when I decided to try a solution I was thinking about and others agreed was a possible answer - using a VCR as an intermediary between the vintage system and the capture device. So I went into my very-much-needs-to-be-organized-and-cataloged storage area under the basement stairs to grab an old VCR. I hooked it up and was unable to switch to the video input because I didn't have the remote.

I don't have time to do a thorough analysis (i.e., plugging it in) just now as I need to take care of some pressing Intellivision stuff (since last night I did our taxes), but I seem to have stumbled upon a bit of good luck x2. Even though that luck doesn't involve finding a mass of riches, in the world of retrocomputing, it's still kind of neat. I recently acquired what was purported to be a Dick Smith VZ200, which is the Australian version of the Video Technology (Laser) VZ200. To my surprise, this is an actually an NTSC version, which from all that I've seen, has been pretty much an unknown quantity to this point, at least on the Web. When I get a chance, I'll be doing a thorough analysis of this budget system, but I took a few quick snapshots in the meantime. (read towards the bottom for the bonus bit of good luck)