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Digitizing VGA? (take 2)
urgent asks: "In March of 2002, Ask Slashdot ran this article, wherein advice on 'hardware to digitize the VGA output of a PC' was sought. Most of the responses seemed to assume that remote administration of PC's/servers was the end goal. If you've got control of the software and/or hardware, it's pretty clear there are easier solutions for that. On the other had, there are many legacy and embedded systems where it would be nice to monitor and record display output. For instance, integrating old computerized factory equipment into a SCADA system, or recording old embedded maritime and medical displays (hint: jobs). My dream hardware would be a dongle that connected to a VGA out and could be polled over ethernet or CAN."
There's a plenty of VGA to IP boxes out there:
Heres one: It's bacially a 8-port KVM stwith with a built in computer thar does VNC. infor
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They have some ISA and PCI -> Serial cards aviable that lets you serial port what would normally be on the screen (text only).
Depending on the legacy system this might be workable.
These are good for extending the output of the devices, but in the end, all you end up is the same monitor connected to a really long cable.
Remember... CAT5 DOES NOT IMPLY TCP/IP. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you plug one of these extenders into a switch, you will probably destroy both the switch and extender. They use cat5 simply because it is cheap and universally availible.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
That was probably a matrox meteor - or there are a couple other models the names of which I've forgotten. A good place to find them would be the clinical imaging department of your local hospital. At least at the hopital I work at, there are these old pc's with these cards hooked up to ancient medical imaging equipment. Most hospitals are moving to PACS systems and throwing these old kludges out. Try to find a guy who fixes the various modalities and ask em to keep an eye out for you. A bribe would probably help ;)
This link is their technical issues section (no longer on the site) .. it doesn't particularly apply to what this guy is asking though since they are primarily concerned with a conversion of VGA to NTSC -- a much different problem.