Video Toaster Flyer Source Code Release

[boing]

Valan is mistaken.

 The Toaster/Flyer combo are custom hardware that were designed to augment the elegant OCS/ECS/AGA  chipset.

 It's not like they have special processors per se that do heavy math-- you're thinking like a wintel head: brute force instead of elegant design.  Think of the Amiga T/F as ASICs combined with something akin to a hybrid analog/video/DSP computer.

  Why do you need so much horsepower for the Wintel version of the Toaster?  Because there's no OCS/AGA chipset, and they had to do a lot of the processing via software (since their existing hardware would not have anything to mate with in a wintel box).  Whereas the Amiga version was custom hardware that often did what it did without the need for silly ATI-style solutions.  Think about real sprites and playfields vs. the silly blitting and software solutions required on "modern" equipment.  The overhead is obvious when you see emulations like UAE.  Doing things with custom hardware is almost always better.

 I'd wager there's some IProp on the wintel versions of the Toaster package that steal from the original CBM-Amiga chipset patents.

  This release will help people get the Toaster/Flyer working better on AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9.

Seriously, NewTek isn't the company we once new.  Gone are the great thinkers who want elegant hardware design.  Now it's all these friggin' "software engineers" who saddle the processor and busy the bus because they're too stupid to figure out a proper solution.

[Erwin-K]

amije,

Who needs it? People in North America, Japan & Korea. People who have systems at work with little hope of getting upgrades purchased. A lot of non-profit groups, churches, and government agencies.

As for a PAL version? I can't state this as a proven fact, but... Among Toaster users the general belief is that NewTek took other company's video chips and forced them to do things that the manufacturers never dreamed of.  Some / many / most of these video chips did not have PAL equivalents. (If there had been, maybe C= would not have gone under.) Do you think NewTek did not want to sell Toasters all over the world?

[Tigger]

so what! who needs it anymore? where was newteck when the europe wanted a pal version?
and what did about it?

The Toaster was designed using a Motorola part that was to be available in both NTSC and PAL versions.  Motorola cancelled the PAL version and thus we have no PAL toaster, if you want to be mad, be mad at the right company, Motorola.
      -Tig

[downix]

@Tigger

There's a great add-on that converted NTSC to PAL signals that fit inside the Amiga, can't recall what it's called now tho.  Worked like a charm tho.

[Pyromania]

Great point Tigger, I agree! I had heard a Sony chip was the culprit though, I did not know about Motorola.