VB SE100PI stands for Video Blaster SE100 Programming Information. It is the development tool you can use to develop your own customized applications for the Video Blaster family of cards. There are a wide range of applications you can develop, for example, in the area of security systems, image processing, multimedia databases, etc.
The VB SE100PI is designed for third party DOS and Windows 3.1x/Windows 95 developers who intend to develop customized applications using the Video Blaster family of cards. There are a wide range of possible applications where you could incorporate Video Blaster family cards.
The VB SE100PI includes functions to do:
In order to assist developers to fully utilize the card, the VB SE100PI
comes with:
For DOS, developers should be familiar with interrupt calls and accessing the CPU registers.
For Windows, developers are assumed to have some knowledge about MCI programming. In particular, developers should be familiar with MCI command messages/strings and how to use them in their applications.
Although the package is for the VB SE100 (which is currently the latest version of the video overlay family boards), the programming information is also applicable to earlier version of boards such as the Video Blaster, Video Blaster FS200 and Video Blaster SE.
It support DOS, Windows 3.1x & Windows 95. For DOS, it includes an interface to the DOS driver, while for Windows Media Control Interface (MCI) commands are included.
You can download the latest Windows 95 driver for the VB SE100 (1208k).
In DOS, the interface is through software interrupt calls to the DOS driver. There is no compiler-specific library. You can choose to use any compilers/development tools that support software interrupt calls with parameter passing via registers.
The Windows interface is through MCI function calls. Therefore, theoretically any compilers/development tools that support MCI calls will work. One example about this kind of compilers/development tools is Microsoft Visual Basic.
You can use API functions to gain access to the video frame buffer in either RGB or YUV formats and save in various commonly used graphic file formats.
The MCI command sets in the VB SE100PI are actually a superset of the standard MCI commands. We have added more command sets to fully utilize the hardware specific features.
You need to use the Video for Windows Development Kit from Microsoft. Your application will interface with the Video for Windows driver. The VB SE100PI only covers the overlay video but not the Video for Windows portion.
You can connect 3 video sources (2 PAL/NTSC and 1 S-video) to the card. But, you can only have one live video at a time. The video from the other sources will be frozen. A typical application would be a security system where multiple video sources are connected to the card and the live video will switch from one to another after a certain interval of time.
The SE100PI is available to public for free.
You can download it now (776k).
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