@rednova
For someone with a background in animation and 3D modelling, learning to be an engineer would take a minimum of 4 years in college but in your case, I'd suspect it would take a lot longer and wouldn't be worth the effort.
The fanciness of the OpalVision card was the never-released "Roaster" chip that was a CPLD. Likewise, the Video Toaster has an FPGA on the board that is programmable by software if need be. The fanciness of these hardware boards was that they could be reconfigured by software or changing of one chip.
It is for this reason that your best bet is to learn to program in C instead of AmosPro for now. If you went to college to be an engineer you'd need to learn it anyway. I'm willing to help you learn it little by little so you can start to read existing software renderers. Once you get from AmosPro to C, I can help you look at Assembly code. Once you get Assembly code, we can maybe look into raw logic gates and how they fit together.
I must warn you that it takes a lot of skill and dedication to become a software engineer, and much more yet to become a hardware engineer.
