Amiga Video Toaster in FPGA just like minimeg

[Pyromania]

Can it be done? Even if it was the original more limited Video Toaster 2000 card at first? Sounds like a hot new project for Dennis or someone else. We have a free Video Toaster 4000 card up for grabs for a hardware hacker that wants to take a stab at it.

[Crom00]

It can be done. Is it cost effective? Maybee.
The toaster used a bunch of custom chips so why not... would be nice to make a version with a builtin TBC but extended for HDTV resolution.

Imagine a Video Toaster on a chip? makes my mouth water...

A live VJ system that fits in a shirt pocket, like Snappy used to.

[whiteb]

Hey crom00,

Check your mail.

[Pyromania]

Since almost all video cameras sold now are digital I don't think a TBC is even needed. MiniDV, HDV, etc video cameras feed right into the Amiga Video Toaster, no TBC required.

[amigadave]

Make it a Toaster/Flyer combination all in FPGA and you will really have something!

[Crom00]

Apple should license the toaster and make a VIDEO TOASTER IPOD... LOL! Of course it would only work with Final Cut Pro.

[Pyromania]

It's almost a decade later so I'm asking again, can it be done?

[Andre.Siegel]

@ Pyromania

What would be the point? Who still uses NTSC with (ex-)standard aspect ratio when most people carry all-digital high-definition widescreen cameras in their pockets?

[amiadudeorwat]

@ Pyromania

What would be the point?

That's the real question.  There isn't much point to it, back when the toaster was useful the main way people added effects like the animated transitions or overlaid text was to play a tape on one input with the toaster superimposing the effect on the live video and recording it out to another tape deck.  We got away from that years ago when the work method was to just record everything right to the computer and apply the effect and save the resulting video back to the hard drive.  Then you just shared the video with effects to whatever medium you wanted (burn a DVD, upload to web, etc.)  The flyer helped shift to this paradigm but compared to today the flyer doesn't really compress video all that well compared to MPEG4.  All this requires in the modern sense is a single video recording device and a lot of CPU power and HDD space.  Very few video capture devices even perform hardware compression anymore since CPUs are so fast.  

So if the question is can an FPGA be used as a video capture device and a hardware compression/decompression engine-sure it can, there are designs out there for FPGA MPEG4 compression.  The the next problem is that you'd need someone to write drivers for all this and support it in one of the non linear editing packages, probably forget about the classic Toaster software being adapted to something so new.

[billt]

It's almost a decade later so I'm asking again, can it be done?

Is there enough documentstIn about what is in the original chips to figure out how to clone them?

[Heiroglyph]

Is there enough documentstIn about what is in the original chips to figure out how to clone them?

Most of it's in Tim's head and they basically only work because of observed behavior, not technical specifications. The RAM for example runs WAY out of spec, but after experiments it proved to work in practice.

That's why there was never a PAL version. It would have been almost as much work to remake it in PAL timings as making the original NTSC version in the first place. It's not just an adjustment like most people assumed.

I'm sure the source for all the programmable chips is still around, but this was way before Verilog. I think the whole Flyer (including programmable chips and DSPs) is in the OpenVT distribution although I could be mistaken.

I think it would be easier with the fast FPGAs available today. You could focus on what needs to be done rather than finding a hack that makes the timing line up.

I'm sure it's possible, but it would be a major undertaking and would it be useful anymore?

[Matt_H]

I think at this point it's less of a "usefulness" exercise and more of a "preservation" one.

[Heiroglyph]

If it's for preservation I'd start with the software. The cards are as easily available as any Amiga device ever made and (inexplicably) rarely seem to fail.

At least the software could live on with new features and on newer platforms.

[polyp2000]

Apple should license the toaster and make a VIDEO TOASTER IPOD... LOL! Of course it would only work with Final Cut Pro.

Screw Apple . Thanks.

[QuikSanz]

It's almost a decade later so I'm asking again, can it be done?

Ya know with 1080p as a minimum it could come in very handy.