I saw one of these unicorn bits of hardware again recently and it got me thinking.
So i think first things first, what is it, and what does it do?
If i recall correctly, it seems to be a zorro2 board, judging by the 24bit address bus, and 16bit data bus connections on the board.
It outputs its video direct onto the CD32 equivilent of the AGA video slot on the 200pin exp connector, effectively bypassing the AGA chipset in graphics rendering and getting the picture direct to the TV as far as i can figure out.
all the software to run the thing is rom based.
again if i recall correctly, it eats the bottom 4meg out of the zorro2 memory area - so it's not ever going to be PCMCIA compatible. this is why on the CD32 expansions that allowed the connection of the FMV card, with the card connected, you could only plug in 4meg of ram as opposed to 8 - if sticking with the stock 68EC020.
initially i had this weird idea of if it was possible to reverse engineer it into a Zorro board. but then realised it's not the decoding the video stream that's the issue.
its getting the decoded data back into the amiga's framebuffer - be it chip ram, or a graphics card for display.
as looking at the nearest previous zorro equivilent Peggy, or Peggy+ boards, they either display out to their own dedicated monitor, or genlock over the amiga's native display - to again, displayed on their own dedicated monitor for video in the amiga's workbench windows or full screen in standard chipset resolutions.
thinking about it. this is why the CV64/3D ViRGE chip had the scenic highway bus to plug its prototype mpeg decoder into. the decoder could dump output straight into the graphics card's ram, and the chip could use its "overlay" feature to effectively digitally genlock the graphics in that section of ram over the frame buffer's display. it would never touch any actual amiga display hardware at all.
what do we think? with the vampires and supercharged 060's out there; is there any need for a dedicated video decoder card? and maybe that can dump back into amiga accessable display ram?
thoughts and ideas? kinda shooting the breeze on this one, also to expand my understanding and knowledge if i'm honest