Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: nimtene on June 23, 2007, 02:06:26 AM
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Hello, very cool forum here, just found out
about it, when searching for some Amiga help.
I'm completely new to using Amigas, so please
forgive if my ignorance is completely obvious.
I got an Amiga 2000 yesterday. It came with
a DCTV connector, which I thought I could
use to output composite to a TV screen, as
I don't have a compatible monitor yet. But
when I boot up the system, all I get is fuzz
on the screen. I know the DCTV is useful for
digitizing video input and such, but am I
wrong in thinking that it will allow me to
directly use my TV as the primary Monitor?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
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Yes, you bought the wrong thing. This is a color framebuffer substitute. The device you want is an A520 adapter.
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Hi, the DCTV only works with the DCTV software and ouputs 24 bit better than Amiga quality composite video. You need an A520 video adaptor to output the regular Amiga display as color composite video. Another option is an A2300 genlock board and just by coincidence, I just listed mine on Ebay. Here it is:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=220124566381&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=012 (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=220124566381&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=012)
Most other genlocks will do this as well and some of the better ones will have s-video outs.
Also, if you need the DCTV software, PM me, I have an extra set of disks. Cheers
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Strictly speaking, the DCTV unit works with a number of apps. besides the DCTV software.... Scenery Animator, ImageFX, VistaPro, maybe others, I can't remember now. Using a program like Rend24, any graphics program that outputs 24-bit frames can be converted to DCTV frames or an .ANIM. Also, check Aminet for a few handy DCTV unils. I own 5 DCTV units, one for each Amiga :)
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I own 5 DCTV units, one for each Amiga :)
Yeah, DCTV is cool. It is one of the most underrated pieces of Amiga hardware around. I own 3 of them, 2 working and one that I fried by connecting it to a Toaster equipped Amiga. I had read that the Toaster and DCTV were incompatible but I just had to try it once and they weren't kidding about that one. Just glad it didn't fry the Toaster. And that's where my extra disks are from.
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The A2000 have a videocomponent to outside right in the original board, like the A500, but this is monochrome.
In that conector u can hook a video cable to tv, plus use the audio conectors to the tv set too (stereo RCA conectors), or to a amplifier/stereo box/wathever (don't use in ordinary peecee loudspeakers, the sound will became crappy).
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Hi Ami_Gfx: Nice bit of info there about DCTV and the Toaster, do you know if there is any workaround? I ask only because I now own 2 A4000's, and I deal with a video company with 'extra' Video Toasters, but worried about the DCTV/VT compatability, as you mentioned.....
Really the question is moot, for me ,at least...I am already down one Amiga monitor, don't you need 3 for a Toaster setup? Plus a TBC??
Feel free to PM me, or whatever.....just curious....
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Yes much agreed, I spent many good hours with my DCTV. Infact it was the first time I did a full digital painting was on DCTV paint. I used Image FX and Scenery Animator on the the DCTV buffer a lot too. My wife did some really cool paintings with it too. I'll post the some of the artwork as soon as I can find it.
I kept it around even though I haven't used it in a long time because I always new I would come back to it. Since I sold my A1200 (why oh why!) :boohoo: and I am seting up my A2000 with a Video Toaster, I think I'll pickup an A500 just for DCTV. :-)
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do you know if there is any workaround?
Since this is a hardware issue--ie there is something that happens when a DCTV is connected to a Toaster equipped Amiga that physically damages the DCTV, work arounds are unlikely. The best work around is a dedicated Amiga.
You need 2 monitors for a Toaster system. One Amiga RGB monitor for the Amiga control panel, one composite monitor for the Toaster output. You can use 3 which will give you a monitor for the Toaster preview output but this is not absoultely neccessary. With the A2000 Toaster, you can use the mono composite out for the control monitor and that is what a lot of video production studios did.
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Ami_GFX wrote:
Yeah, DCTV is cool. It is one of the most underrated pieces of Amiga hardware around.................
Totally agree with that statement! DCTV could do amazing displays with minimal resources. I don't understand why it did not succeed more, but I guess that the people that developed it got distracted with bigger and better things (I believe if my memory serves me correctly the developers of DCTV joined with ex-NewTek employees and formed Play Inc.)
IMHO DCTV was a revolutionary device that could have done so much more and could have helped Commodore and Amiga greatly if further development had been done and,or more game programmers had written a version of their games in DCTV format. Can you imagine all of our favorite Amiga games running at 24bit color depth and full speed on any Amiga model.
I once saw at an Amiga Show an stock 030 A3000 w/DCTV running the complete Back to the Future movie in DCTV format from the hard drive, smoothly and at full speed with no skipped frames. This was years before anyone was able to duplicate that feat on a PC or Mac. I was amazed and put the DCTV on my Amiga "Must Have" shopping list. I think I have 6 or 7 DCTV's now and 2 of them have the rare RGB add-on units to allow the DCTV format display to be shown on any 15kHz RGB monitor, like a 1080, or 1084, so you don't have to switch back and forth from RGB to Composite and back.
I thought there was one game that came out in DCTV format, but can't think of the name. Maybe I am confusing it with the 24bit game that came with the OpalVision card?
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Very Good thread, here...
OK, @AmigaPixel: Well, If you try to get a 500 for your DCTV, at least try to get some mem. expansion beyond 1MB, and if possible, an accelerator...will make using dctv much nicer... I used my DCTV originally with an A500 030/50MHz, 32 MB RAM, worked quite nicely...
@AmigaDave: I think the game you recall was actually for the OpalVision card, never saw a game for DCTV, though theoretically there should be no reason it wouldn't be possible, IMHO.
Oh, and to whoever mentioned about why the DCTV was not more sucessful....original price was $495.00 at indroduction, just checked an old issue of .INFO... Wasn't the A500 about $500 retail itself?
Ridiculous, I just got a DCTV unit, software, and a non-working sound sampler for $4.99 on EBay....
:roll:
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I also loved my DCTV. Only drawback of course was that the output was composite. It would be great to hack one into s-video or RGB. I may be interested in buying another one... I don't know what I'd use it for, but I always thought it would have been cool to write a DCTV workbench monitor driver and display 24bit workbench..
But to answer the original question, you can't use it as a composite out for normal use. You need an A520 adapter.
Now, a better solution though is to get the neobitz board and convert RGB->s-video. It's $30 in kit form.
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amigadave wrote:
...I don't understand why it did not succeed more, but I guess that the people that developed it got distracted with bigger and better things (I believe if my memory serves me correctly the developers of DCTV joined with ex-NewTek employees and formed Play Inc.)
IMHO DCTV was a revolutionary device that could have done so much more and could have helped Commodore and Amiga greatly if further development had been done and,or more game programmers had written a version of their games in DCTV format. Can you imagine all of our favorite Amiga games running at 24bit color depth and full speed on any Amiga model.
Amiga Dave wins the prize for hitting this one right on the head!
As I've said before, I wrote the digitize and process setions, as well as a bunch of the front end, of the DCTV manual. As a result, I was lucky and got to see DCTV before anyone else...I still have the video around here that shows Randy Jongens demoing a very beta version of the software so we could write the manual.
At one point I know that Digital Creations, and their partners from Progressive Image, had talks with Commodore about selling CBM the DCTV technology for installation into upcoming Amiga products (this would have been about the time the A4000/1200 was in development). I think CBM compared DCTV to the AGA concept, which they owned, and decided not to pay Digital for the rights to use DCTV technology.
Not sure if this story every made it beyond the backroom at Digital but, since it's so long and all the companies are gone, what the heck. I feel like Cheney, lets declassify it!
Bob
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the composite output from an a2300 genlock in a 2000 is way better than an a520 imho and if you ever wanted to you could do genlock stuff with it. even (iirc) genlock the dctv output onto the amiga output from the genlock.
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beller wrote:
amigadave wrote:
...I don't understand why it did not succeed more, but I guess that the people that developed it got distracted with bigger and better things (I believe if my memory serves me correctly the developers of DCTV joined with ex-NewTek employees and formed Play Inc.)
IMHO DCTV was a revolutionary device that could have done so much more and could have helped Commodore and Amiga greatly if further development had been done and,or more game programmers had written a version of their games in DCTV format. Can you imagine all of our favorite Amiga games running at 24bit color depth and full speed on any Amiga model.
Amiga Dave wins the prize for hitting this one right on the head!
As I've said before, I wrote the digitize and process setions, as well as a bunch of the front end, of the DCTV manual. As a result, I was lucky and got to see DCTV before anyone else...I still have the video around here that shows Randy Jongens demoing a very beta version of the software so we could write the manual.
At one point I know that Digital Creations, and their partners from Progressive Image, had talks with Commodore about selling CBM the DCTV technology for installation into upcoming Amiga products (this would have been about the time the A4000/1200 was in development). I think CBM compared DCTV to the AGA concept, which they owned, and decided not to pay Digital for the rights to use DCTV technology.
Not sure if this story every made it beyond the backroom at Digital but, since it's so long and all the companies are gone, what the heck. I feel like Cheney, lets declassify it!
Bob
You mean I haven't lost all my marbles yet? :lol:
Very interesting to have some of my guesses and memories from the distant past confirmed. I did not know the part about DCTV being considered by Commodore as a native display option for the A4000/A1200. Too bad Commodore/Amiga did not decide to go with both display technologies in the last Amigas and support the DCTV format earlier. With most Amigas connected to 1080 and 1084 monitors in the early days, it would have been a "no brainer" to use the DCTV format for programs that did not need the sharpness of the RGB output, like games and perhaps image manipulation software. I don't know how the DCTV RGB converter works, but it does not seem to be an expensive, or power hungry device (compared to today's graphic display devices and cards). Now I am going to have to spend some time on my A500 w/A530 & 8mb RAM that has one of my DCTV's installed to refresh my memory of all the features and the display quality of the DCTV.
For those unfamiliar with what DCTV is, or does, a short explanation in layman's terms is offered. DCTV displays a composite signal using 3 or 4 bit planes that appears to have a 24bit color range. The Amiga thinks it is just manipulating the 3, or 4 bit planes, so it can easily run animations at a high frame rate using such a low bit plane format. If memory serves me, I think the DCTV display quality is close to standard TV display or VHS composite display quality.
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To answer the original poster's question:
No, you can't use the DCTV for displaying Workbench and instead of all the other recommendation's on how to get s-video out of your Amiga, just go to eBay and buy a monitor that WILL display the native Amiga display format. You will be much happier looking at the RGB display instead of any composite display.
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for games and light video work having the possibility of using a (large) composite tv or such is good.
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I have a DCTV with RGB adaptor. In my opinion, absoultely necessary! It act as one display with the Amigas original display...........ontop of that I have a SupergenSX genlock wich gives me S-Video OUT for the DCTV and allows me to genlock DCTV images and also mix them with Amigas output. Now kke in mind that the DCTV's output is Composite.............so even with the S-Video OUT it still looks like TV resolution composite. Just minus the interference or whatever. I am experimenting to getting it to work in combo with the ChromaKEY Plus! it seems to be sucking too much power, so I need a bigger PSU. If this works I will be happy as can be.
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Very Good thread, here...
OK, @AmigaPixel: Well, If you try to get a 500 for your DCTV, at least try to get some mem. expansion beyond 1MB, and if possible, an accelerator...will make using dctv much nicer... I used my DCTV originally with an A500 030/50MHz, 32 MB RAM, worked quite nicely...
@AmigaDave: I think the game you recall was actually for the OpalVision card, never saw a game for DCTV, though theoretically there should be no reason it wouldn't be possible, IMHO.
Oh, and to whoever mentioned about why the DCTV was not more sucessful....original price was $495.00 at indroduction, just checked an old issue of .INFO... Wasn't the A500 about $500 retail itself?
Ridiculous, I just got a DCTV unit, software, and a non-working sound sampler for $4.99 on EBay....
:roll: [/quote]
:-o $4.99 for a DCTV! WOW! I paid about $300, and that was a price drop. Of course that was in 1993.
Yes indeed I agree as far as the upgrades you mentioned. The Amiga and DCTV are efficient, however 512K isn't much to work with. Although if I remember correctly, there is a second icon to launch a version for low ram Amigas. Now that I think about it, I would probably shoot for a stock A1200 with a little extra ram. :-D
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.....At one point I know that Digital Creations, and their partners from Progressive Image, had talks with Commodore about selling CBM the DCTV technology for installation into upcoming Amiga products (this would have been about the time the A4000/1200 was in development). I think CBM compared DCTV to the AGA concept, which they owned, and decided not to pay Digital for the rights to use DCTV technology.
Not sure if this story every made it beyond the backroom at Digital but, since it's so long and all the companies are gone, what the heck. I feel like Cheney, lets declassify it!
Bob[/quote]
;-) Now that is the background history I love to find out about. :-D
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.....I thought there was one game that came out in DCTV format, but can't think of the name. Maybe I am confusing it with the 24bit game that came with the OpalVision card?
Yes it was called something like King Karate. It was 24bit game too if I recall. I played only a few times when I had an Opalvision in my A2000. :-)
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A few more words about the DCTV:
An RGB adaptor is nice, but not absolutely neccessary. The quality of the composite output is amazing--much better than the normal mono composite out of an A2000 and much much better than the color composite out of the A2300 genlock. The DCTV has a really saturated color output which is really apealing for graphics, animation and games. It is more intensely colored than real life for sure. I love DCTV paint. I personally find it's compsite out on a modern LCD monitor much better than the RGB out of an Amiga on a 1084 monitor.
And of the 3 DCTVs I own, the most expensive one was $24--package deal with a DigiView gold digitizer as well. The cheapest was around $5 or $6. This is one of the real bargains in Amiga hardware.
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Ami_GFX wrote:
A few more words about the DCTV:
......."The DCTV has a really saturated color output which is really apealing for graphics, animation and games. It is more intensely colored than real life for sure. I love DCTV paint. I personally find it's compsite out on a modern LCD monitor much better than the RGB out of an Amiga on a 1084 monitor."
I agree, I always liked the saturated look of DCTV too. I never found a paint program on the PC that has the nice mixing palate like DCTV paint except for Mirage, which I was told was developed by former Amiga developers. :-D I have to ask, are you also known as DavidDB on the Newtek Amiga Toaster forum. :-)
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Yes I am. Not much action on that forum these days.
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Ami_GFX wrote:
Yes I am. Not much action on that forum these days.
I suspected when I saw your hardware listing the Merlin RTG Card and the SouthWest location. Cool! :-D I am mysticpixels on that forum. Yes it seemed to die down after I joined it. That figures.
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Someone should look inside and see if they can pull the s-video from the board before it is combined into composite.
I have one on the way and will do that when it arrives :)
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.....At one point I know that Digital Creations, and their partners from Progressive Image, had talks with Commodore about selling CBM the DCTV technology for installation into upcoming Amiga products (this would have been about the time the A4000/1200 was in development). I think CBM compared DCTV to the AGA concept, which they owned, and decided not to pay Digital for the rights to use DCTV technology.
Actually the tech was to go into CDTV, in fact they demoed it as a addon card at Devcon 91, full NTSC color animation off of the CDTV with the card. I'm not sure why it fell through, though it may have been that they thought the 3000+ would make it obsolete, and they may have it we had actually gotten A3000+, instead of the hacked up A4000s at a much more expensive price.
-Tig
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marcfrick2112 wrote:
I own 5 DCTV units, one for each Amiga :)
Ah, but do you have one for your CDTV? :) I'm still looking for that one, although I've met one person who has one (or "it"?)
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Tigger wrote:
Actually the tech was to go into CDTV, in fact they demoed it as a addon card at Devcon 91, full NTSC color animation off of the CDTV with the card.
-Tig
Tigger, any idea how many of those cards (a NTSC CDTV DCTV, wow)were made? I've only ever met one person who had one, and he was not inclined to part with it.
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Someone should look inside and see if they can pull the s-video from the board before it is combined into composite.
Necro bump... ;-)
Just a heads up, if you have a DCTV-RGB converter, you can basically do that.
I had my DCTV hooked up to my Amiga 500.
Into the DCTV, I had the DCTV RGB converter.
In the DCTV RGB converter, I had an Amigamaniac svideo adapter.
Was stacked pretty far out of the back of the Amiga, but it worked and looked great.
I have a 1084s monitor on there now, but it worked great when I tested it.
Big problem with the DCTV was (IMHO) it didn't output to the monitor (they did eventually release the RGB Adapter) and cost $500 on release.
You're not going to sell too many to the majority of Amiga owners that way.
Although the price did drop to a more reasonable $300 ish after not too long, but you still had to pay for the RGB-Adapter if you didn't want to have 2 monitors.
It is a great piece of hardware tho, just wish they could have released it with RGB and a more reasonable price. I think they would have moved a LOT more units that way..
I didn't have a DCTV back in the day, but I do now and it's really nice.
I did have a HAM-E back in the day. Similar, but only RGB (no composite, which I think is a better choice). That was great fun, but it was a monster and I remember it got pretty warm...
But looking at JPGs (The HAM-E software was supposedly the first commercial software to support JPG, or so they said when they uploaded the JPG module) back in the day on my Amiga in 24-bit color was awesome.. ;-)
desiv
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Someone should look inside and see if they can pull the s-video from the board before it is combined into composite.
I have one on the way and will do that when it arrives :)
S-Video isn't necessarily better than standard Composite video when connecting two devices. It depends on which device has the better comb filter. The signal is exactly the same before chroma and luma are split.
So, for instance, if you had a Pioneer Elite dvd player and fishbowl Magnavox television that just happened to have an S-Video input, you would connect S-Video, because for sure the high end Pioneer player will have better comb filters. If you have a no-name $20 DVD player from China and a Sony XBR^2 TV, you would connect composite because the set will have better comb filters. And if you have the Elite player and the XBR, it's likely a wash.
I remember taking the DCTV to a local TV station to lay off some work for them and, hooked up to the scopes, it was pretty clean. At the very least it was as good as the Truevision VID I/O Box I'd previously been using for RGB->Composite.
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IMHO DCTV was a revolutionary device that could have done so much more and could have helped Commodore and Amiga greatly if further development had been done and,or more game programmers had written a version of their games in DCTV format. Can you imagine all of our favorite Amiga games running at 24bit color depth and full speed on any Amiga model.
The DCTV was simply amazing. It was like having a TARGA board, only you could do things with the DCTV that you couldn't do with the TARGA or any other truecolor boards for PCs or Macs at the time. Or the VideoToaster.
In 1990/1991 and for many years after truecolor framebuffers required single frame recording to very expensive video decks in order to achieve motion. This was typically done with composite video to analog recording devices. 3/4" U-Matic was about the least expensive, industrial quality used at the time and it's a composite recording medium. Betacam would be the next step up in quality at a major increase in price while still only offering 300 lines of resolution though it recorded a crude form of component video.
It wouldn't be until a few years later with the introduction of the DPS-Personal Animation Recorder that you could get realtime playback of imagery with this sort of color and quality, though the PAR was only playback and didn't have any video paint support since it didn't allow that sort of access to its framebuffer. DCTV Paint was head and shoulders better than the kludgy way Newtek implemented paint on the VideoToaster.
I had an Amiga3000 when DCTV came out and my buddy and I were running a little graphics and Amiga training outfit in Corpus Christi, TX and though I don't recall the job that paid for my DCTV it was likely the best $200 I ever spent on the Amiga (I could be wrong on price, I was still getting my old employee discount from when I worked at the local Amiga dealer in high school). Combined with Pageflipper + Effects I could do 640x400 ANIM playback that didn't bog, recording to 8mm video at U-Matic quality and no need for single frame controllers.
Animations that I did in Hash's Animation:Apprentice and Imagine output full-color through the DCTV got me accepted into CalArts, which got me a job at an Oscar winning effects facility shortly thereafter and a pretty amazing career, and I credit a lot of that snowball to the DCTV (and the Amiga, of course). I wasn't showing them HAM playback or single frames. They were seeing images that looked as good as what their MFA students were doing with Wavefront TAV and their TARGA recording setup.
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At one point I know that Digital Creations, and their partners from Progressive Image, had talks with Commodore about selling CBM the DCTV technology for installation into upcoming Amiga products (this would have been about the time the A4000/1200 was in development). I think CBM compared DCTV to the AGA concept, which they owned, and decided not to pay Digital for the rights to use DCTV technology.
I would guess this was a backup plan. AGA development was internally controversial.
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If I recall, there were similar rumors about Black Belt Systems that may or may not have been helped along by them. I remember not being impressed with their box due to lower resolution.
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Reading this old thread come back to life makes wish I had working Amiga for my DCTV! Actually the DCTV is in storage at a location I unable to get to for the time being. So I need to get the A2000 fixed up and buy another DCTV. Speaking of the PAR card I had one installed in my A2000 for a few years and I often had wished I could use it with the DCTV.
The patents should have have expired, I wonder if anyone would be interested in reverse engineering a DCTV unit and seeing what expansion or upgrading could be done with it? I am not sure a company even like Individual Computers would want to spend the resources on such a project. However maybe some one here with the technical knowledge and skill not to mention the time and inclination, might be interested in such a project
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What for though? For folks still using classic hardware? Composite video has kinda had its day. It's pretty horrible looking on flat panels. Even VGA signals look bad on them now.
I wonder if we'll ever see some hipster start-up creating new CRTs. I've still got my first 1080-HD CRT I ever bought, all 200lbs of it, and I'm not giving it up until it simply doesn't work anymore.
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What for though? For folks still using classic hardware? Composite video has kinda had its day. It's pretty horrible looking on flat panels. Even VGA signals look bad on them now.
I wonder if we'll ever see some hipster start-up creating new CRTs. I've still got my first 1080-HD CRT I ever bought, all 200lbs of it, and I'm not giving it up until it simply doesn't work anymore.
Good point! Composite video is history. I just like the idea of taking a DCTV and seeing what could be done with it further. Even though there would be no point anymore. It was/is really a fun add on to the Amiga.
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Yes, it was uniquely Amiga. Very clever. I seem to remember the slow-scan digitizer functionality to work better than any other parallel port digitizer I'd tried. Somehow the others all ended up with weird jaggies, even using a camera to digitize flat artwork there would often be errors with the others.
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WOW!!!
AmigaDave as a moderator, just goes to show they will let anyone moderate now.
smerf
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Anyway...
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Good point! Composite video is history.
That's why no consoles being produced and sold currently are just composite.. er.. um...
(Yes, I'm looking at you Nintendo...)
Heck, when they put together the Raspberry Pi, they went with HDMI and composite. No s-video, no RGB/VGA, no component.
Composite is still the low end standard. It ain't history yet.. ;-)
As for DCTV, it's great. I have one and love it..
I would STRONGLY recommend getting the DCTV RGB adapter too.. That way you can see DCTV images on your monitor, not just composite. I think not including that was what kept the DCTV from being THE standard Amiga video enhancement (that and price. ;-). (Although, it basically is the standard Amiga video enhancement based on sales I'd guess)
I also had a HAM-E back in the day, and loved that.. I remember downloading the JPG (viewer, plugin, converter software??? It's vague) software just when it was available right around the same time JPG was standardized. (I think I remember the Black Belt guys saying their software was the first commercial software to release JPG support (just by a few days or hours ;-) on a compuserve chat thing.)
That was incredible. JPG images on the HAM-E.. WOW..
I never noticed a problem with resolution. I did have the PLUS model, which had the higher res mode, but that was a bit of a trick. That mode created a higher res image that used more colors and looked great, but as I recall, you couldn't do anything with those extra pixels directly. The hardware used them for improved resolution and shading, but i don't think I could render an image TO that mode. I think there were just 24-bit images that displayed better with that mode. I think in todays world, that mode would be like an upscaler. Your DVD isn't producing more pixels, but the upscaler is to give you a better (supposedly) picture.
To be honest, I remember being incredibly impressed by HAM-E, but the plus didn't seem much different to me.
Also, HAM-E was RGB only (not sure if you could use a genlock or something to convert it to composite if needed???).
So, where DCTV was basically only composite for consumers, HAM-E was basically only RGB.
Also, DCTV came with the digitizer, which is nice..
Does anyone who is technical know if it would have been possible to have a DCTV mode game? (Other than like Dragons Lair, which would probably have been doable without too much problem)
desiv
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Yeah, the "Plus" sounds like an interpolation trick. Definitely not something I'd have been interested in. The basic 320x400 screen was good enough for most folks but it was too low rez for what I was working on. Oversampling was either non-existent or really crudely implemented in all the rendering software back then. Working in highres was a must and being able to playback animation in highres.
Composite is still the low end standard. It ain't history yet.. ;-)
It just looks worse than it ever has, especially on flat panels, possibly due to A-to-D. Composite video needs a CRT to look decent. They keep it there because it basically costs nothing to add and there's likely a lot of kids out there with hand-me-down TVs that aren't digital. Old people too.
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Composite video needs a CRT to look decent.
i mostly agree there. I'm a big fan or CRTs for systems...
That being said tho, the Wii composite output looks decent on composite (I've moved to component, but the composite isn't hideous...)
So, I'm thinking that an LCD TV could have good composite quality, even with older systems.
I've read on the forums where some people say composite looks good on their model of LCD TV. (Or I should say panel, be it LCD, LED or Plasma).
But the old systems look terrible on my LCDs.
In fact, the Atari Flashbacks I have (a 3 and a 4) also look pretty bad.
Back to DCTV, I currently have it on my A1000, which gets most of my "retro" use. Unfortunately he only has 512k chip.
I should use him on my A500, which has 2m chip, but I don't have him set up. i usually use the 1000 or the 1200.
And no need for the DCTV on the 1200 (and he has a Grafitti board on him anyway).
512K is plenty for viewing images, but not much beyond that..
desiv
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@desiv
I forgot about HAM-E until you mentioned it. My DCTV is in storage and I can't get to it for now, so I think I will pick one up on Ebay along with the RGB converter. I use to play Caligari 24, Scenery Animator and later LightWave animations through the DCTV, first on my 030 A2000 and later my 060 A1200. They played really well on the latter.
I need to get my A2000 (my only remaining Amiga) up an running first.
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I once saw at an Amiga Show an stock 030 A3000 w/DCTV running the complete Back to the Future movie in DCTV format from the hard drive, smoothly and at full speed with no skipped frames.
I have a DCTV & had absolutely NO IDEA it could do such things! :O
Here I was thinking it just captures images...please more info on this...please?
PZ.
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That being said tho, the Wii composite output looks decent on composite (I've moved to component, but the composite isn't hideous...)
The Wii is mostly simple cartoon graphics, but I would say it is pretty bad. Component is far superior, except it shows just how blocky the graphics are.
S-Video isn't necessarily better than standard Composite video when connecting two devices. It depends on which device has the better comb filter. The signal is exactly the same before chroma and luma are split.
S-video was created purely to skip the step of combining and separating.
I can't think of any reason why you'd have something that would generate the chroma and luma. combine them to composite and then stick them through a filter to extract the chroma and luma. If you get a better picture using composite than using svideo, then either your equipment sounds broken or your definition of better is different to everyone else's.
Of course if your equipment can really only output composite, then you have the choice of letting your TV split the signal or put in a box that splits it and feeds it to the TV. But it's possible the DCTV does have points on the board you can tap the pre mixed chroma and luma.
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Welcome to video?
S-VHS, Laserdisc, etc. these S-Video capable formats didn't actually store to media the video as anything but composite. Then either your player or your set comb filtered the signal and the quality of the filter at either end determined whether or not it was advisable to do it in the player or in the set.
It wasn't a function of whether the equipment could only output composite or S-Video (which is still composite video, since chroma is not separated into its component form) this is how the base signal being displayed is recorded and generated. It's always composite and sometimes a mildly better composite.
Whether there is a more opportune place to tap into the process when an RGB source is being converted to composite video would depend on the components used and whether or not existing RGB->Y/C in fact created discrete streams of Y and C or did a single stream conversion and then offered a second path through a comb filter. In the case of DCTV this is a big "if" because its whole success is based on a hack of the composite signal affecting both streams. Ultimately the tweak to composite only slightly increases luminance resolution since chroma stays abysmally low until you're working true component video in the style of BetaCAM and better.
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And, quick rant..
Why didn't Digital Creations support DCTV with Brilliance!!!!!
It's their software and their hardware!!!
Oh well, DCTV Paint is pretty good..
desiv
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I thought there was one game that came out in DCTV format, but can't think of the name. Maybe I am confusing it with the 24bit game that came with the OpalVision card?
yes dave you are thinking of the Karate game that came with Opalvision. DCTV never came with a game afaik.
I used to use DCTV with an a2000 for outputting Vista Pro Animations in DCTV format super fast and lest OCS/ECS amigas have 18 bit color output.