This post was originally written and posted to Cohost.
My pals, my friends, I got all 120 stars in Super Mario 64! Trust me. Believe me. You don't. I must obtain proof. If only there were a way to take a screenshot of my game...
that's it!!!!!!!!!!!!
Recently, I picked up some video floppy equipment for what I assure you are very valid reasons. Video floppy is obsolete even among floppy disks. Introduced in 1986 by Sony, king of stupid and obscure media formats, the VF disk was created for use in the company's early forays into digital photography. The Museum of Obsolete Media estimates the format died sometime in the 90's, but consumer tech usage seems to have stopped immediately at the end of the 80's.
The "video" in "video floppy" is a bit of a misnomer, as it's incapable of recording video. VF is used for storing still frames of video. Instead of waiting a few years for a technology that let them store images as digital files, Sony jumped the gun as usual and decided to build out an entire system that saves snapshots from a digital camera or other video source onto an analog medium.
A few other companies, notably Canon and Panasonic, jumped onboard to create some crude consumer digital cameras. The cameras are a story for another day, however. Today we're looking at a solution to a problem Sony created: how the hell do you play a video floppy disk? Even if it were the same size as a standard floppy disk, the analog data had to be converted back into video to be usable. Enter the world of video floppy recorders!
Just like a VCR, VF recorders can either play back existing media or record data from a video input. There's not much information about these bad boys online, so I jumped at the first model I could find for a reasonable price: The Panasonic AG-810. The device isn't capable of some of the more advanced features VF has to offer (audio recordings to accompany the images, higher resolution modes) but will get the job done.
Let's do some capturing!!! I immediately ran into my first issue: the AG-810 only takes s-video and what I'm assuming is composite video over BNC. I don't have any BNC adapters, limiting me to whatever I have an s-video cable lying around for. My PS1 s-video cable was claimed by the spiders, so that left me with my laserdisc player and N64. The LD player needs some... work, so I went with the N64. It's Super Fucking Mario Time Baby!!
If we're gonna use a video floppy recorder, we're gonna need some video floppies. I bought an unused 10 pack of Sony branded disks off Ebay. If for some godforsaken reason you want to get into video floppy, look for new-old stock and buy in bulk. Even unused, a good chunk of disks have silently passed on due to the inevitable ebb and flow of time... This is not foreshadowing at all, I promise.
I hooked the N64 s-video cable into the AG-810 and the N64 audio cables and AG-810 s-video out into my Retrotink and powered everything on. Aaaaand nothing. The N64 wasn't even outputting audio, which should be unaffected by the setup. The problems were twofold: 1) my dumb ass forgot to switch the AG-810 to s-video mode and 2) the audio on my N64 s-video cable is apparently toasted (or maybe the console's audio output is?). Fortunately, audio is irrelevant to the capture, and the video-thru was now reaching the Retrotink.
Excited and ready to impress my friends, I slid a floppy in sideways (Sony you silly bastards) and turned the AG-810 on. The interface is as simple as could be, but that didn't stop my from fumbling around for 15 minutes wondering why I couldn't grab any captures. The recorder is equipped with forward and back buttons, a toggle for the on-screen overlay, a button to enter playback mode (PB/Line-in), a record button, a mode switch, and an auto-advance that we'll look at later. No matter what I would press, the standby light for recording wouldn't turn on. Convinced I was doing something wrong, I looked for a manual online. Good luck finding that, nerd!!
I eventually remembered my cleverly disguised foreshadowing from a few paragraphs ago and decided to try another disk. With that, the record button immediately lit up. Damn you, magnetic media. Finally ready to record, I toggled the on-screen display to see what information it presented. 1! 1 what??? It's just 1. It's just fucking 1. I thought it might refer to which output is active, but on switching the record quality switch from Field to Frame, I found the truth: it's the spot on the disk to write to. Video floppy captures in interlaced video, with the high quality ("Frame") mode just capturing two successive frames of video. Thus, the OSD spits out 1-2 in Frame mode, to indicate rings 1 and 2 of the disk will be written to.
The capturing process is very smooth. Upon pressing record, the frame of video is immediately saved to the disk and the device switches to playback mode to show the newly captured image. This does unfortunately mean having to press the Forward button to return to real-time video. I screwed up my BLJ!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I mostly used Frame mode for those sweet high quality Mario overalls. Frame mode does reveal a big problem with video floppy: if you're gonna improve video quality by playing back two frames of interlaced video, what if those frames don't align? Well, it's about what you'd expect: a beautiful, rapidly pulsating Mario. I'm impressed this is the only botched frame I got while moving around. As far as I know, Mario 64 runs in progressive scan, so I'm not sure how the AG-810 interprets that input or what caused the misalignment. Video signal processing is Too Hard for my Brain.
Once you've captured as many frames as you'd like (assuming you'd like up to 50 in field mode or up to 25 in frame mode), the AG-810 can play the "video" back to you as a slideshow by pressing the auto advance button. Here's my wonderful Mario adventure:
Well, I got what I needed: absolute proof of my 120 star save. I can't wait to pop this into my friends' video floppy recorders and see the look on their faces!!!