Did you happen to get a look at the Roaster chip itself? Was it an Xlinx chip, as has been claimed? I wonder how many Roaster chips were ever made? 5, 10, 25, 100? That article says the inventor made over one million dollars in royalties from the Opal Vision card and Opal Paint, but when Commodore went bankrupt, he quit working on the Opal Vision products and switched to his next invention. I would be very surprised if several distributors of the Opal Vision cards did not sue the inventor for failing to fulfill his promise of delivering the Roaster chip and associated software that he had promised, and the distributors had counted on, which is why they had purchased so many of the Opal Vision cards. The Opal Vision card was nice for displaying 24bit images and Opal Paint was a great paint system, but the main selling point of the card was the promised video effects that the Roaster chip would provide.
I dont recall if it said xilinx on it,but it more than likely was a Xilinx cpld.
I recall a tiny number of them were made,i had heard under 10,but dont take that as fact.
I am sure they made good money off the opalvision,but contention within the company is what broke them up,nothing to do with commodore bankrupcy. The Opalvision as is is neet,but not of much use. It can display 24bit workbench backdrops.
I wonder if Xlinx made socketed FPGA chips in 1993 or 1994? Did Xlinx make ASIC chips as well as FPGA chips in the same time frame?
CPLD is most likely,since code goes on the chip and it is programmed much like a fpga,but does not load code like a fpga. It was not a fpga. ASICS are usually created from a factory run of custom chips.
I guess none of this matters much, since standard definition video is not important to many people today and owners of Opal Vision cards are not searching for the owners of the few Roaster equipped Opal Vision cards, to figure out how to duplicate the Roaster chip, if indeed it is an Xlinx FPGA chip. I just find it strange that the Roaster chip was not available in larger quantities, if it was an Xlinx FPGA. Even if the software was not complete, and even if the additional hardware pieces were not produced in quantity, I would have expected someone in the Amiga community to get a hold of the code to program the Xlinx chip and many more owners of Opal Vision cards would have obtained that chip for their Opal Vision cards.
Again its not FPGA,since fpga needs the code loaded from something like rom,flash etc, this was a stand alone preprogrammed chip. CPLD or ASIC. It would be common to see a xilinx used as the proto roaster chip,more than likely going to custom ASIC when it was debugged and ready for release. remember its not just a chip,you also need the software to take advantage of the roaster. Like you said its not really practical since analog video stuff is long since passed.
Even if you could find the code for the chip, finsing a 5v xilinx chip that was pin compatible and the programming software/hardware would also present a challenge.
