I've got 2 Toasters right now, an A2000 Toaster/Flyer system thats an unfinished project at the moment and a Toaster 4000 system that I've put a Merlin RTG card into.
For just playing around with the Video Toaster, a few bnc to RCA adaptors are a cheap solution to your cabling needs. BNC cables cost a lot more than RCA cables and if you're not doing serious pro level video production they will do the job. I use a portable DVD player with a composite in as my program monitor.
if you have a picasso IV you can use a regular computer monitor forthe contoll screen, but no other SD/FF will work AFAIK,
There are other solutions but none of them are cheap or easy. The most common is the Toastscan external scan doubler.They can cost as much as the Toaster itself. And the Picasso IV requires a video slot which means you need an A4000 tower with 2 video slots for this solution. The main problem is that the Toaster uses composite sync and disables the horizontal and vertical sync signals when it is active so whatever scan doubler you use has to be able to use the composite sync signal from the Amiga. The 1084s monitor uses composite sync which is why it is so common with the Toaster. There is an external device called a sync strainer which seperates the horizontal and vertical sync signals from the composite sync signals. I use one with my Toaster 4000 and pass the signal to my Merlin RTG cards RGB video in. The Merlin converts it into composite and s-video. I route the s-video into my LCD TV monitor's s-video input. A bit complicated, but it works. The sync strainer was designed for the AGA chipset and doesn't work that well with ECS Amigas. For the Toaster 2000, I just use the mono video out. The Toaster software looks really good in A2000 composite mono and the Toaster seems to take it over and clean up it's signal quite a bit when it's active.
