DL230 Quantel DPB 7001 The Hardware Part 1 Combiner

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DL230 Quantel DPB 7001 The Hardware Part 1 Combiner

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2 жыл бұрын

www.pcbway.com - The full featured PCB prototype service!
I begin a series of videos looking at how the hardware of the Quantel DPB-7001 Digital Paint Box actually work. The first to look at is the COMBINER card.
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Пікірлер: 26

@roddypratt990 2 жыл бұрын

Lovely to see that. Some combiner card notes - When you "view stencil" the combiner card changes mode to use EXT1 to mix between a store 1 and a combiner-generated matte replacing store 2. Also, as you move cutouts around, the CPU is updating store address card 2, telling it the XY offset to output from. The combiner card doesn't know the cutout position, it just receives streams of pixels. The first demo for the cutout and "Use Stencil" was a "cutout" squirrel being moved through a painted wood, with the wood's stencil defining foreground and background, so the squirrel would be behind some trees but in front of others.

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you for commenting Roddy, it's a privilege to have someone here who worked on the machine. We must get you to have a go on it at some point!

@adev8565 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for your explanations, Roddy! Out of curiosity - what are your feelings towards the Paintboxes? Does thinking of them make you feel sentimental because it was an awesome time creating them or does it bring other kinds of feelings instead?

@KaizerPowerElectronicsDk 2 жыл бұрын

Been looking forward to this series!

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you, there's already a growing list of things i know i can explain so there's more to come!!

@bcdaus 2 жыл бұрын

That combiner card is amazing, especially given this is over 40 year old technology and most of the card is 74-series logic!

@random007nadir 2 жыл бұрын

"What colour should we make this cutting edge piece of ultra-expensive studio hardware?" "Dirty orange is fhs future."

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

It is resplendent in 1970s brown!

@theamigashow9506 2 жыл бұрын

Such an elegant system. Looking forward to seeing a breakdown of the cards.

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you, i will do my best explaining them! I have original Quantel engineers here to correct me when i am wrong!

@frankowalker4662 2 жыл бұрын

Who'd have thought you could do so much with a handfull of logic chips. :) Brilliant.

@cromulence 2 жыл бұрын

Just had a chance to watch this - fascinating stuff as always. It really is amazing how this thing works.

@gordonm2821 2 жыл бұрын

It is crazy that now a bog standard PC motherboard as the host with a beefy GPU graphics card can do this and more for hardly any money. No FPGAs or custom hardware required. The last Generation Q paintbox was pretty much that.

@AltimaNEO Жыл бұрын

Even needing the "beefy" GPU isn't necessary. You could do all this in software by the 90s.

@RooMan93 2 жыл бұрын

I'd love to see how small an FPGA paintbox would be

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Probably surprisingly small!

@mm-hl7gh 2 жыл бұрын

so great to finally get such a good look on a system that whas mystically unreachable back in the days... will you do some projects with this in the future ? (like remaking some 80s commercials effects to show how they have been done, maybe ?)

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

I would love to, but it often involves getting more vintage tech to buy and get working. I would love to source a working Sony BVH-2500 VTR which was used on the Money For Nothing video with Paintbox to make the neon light effects.

@MrVoltz 2 жыл бұрын

Where are the menus and the yellow cursor itself stored? Is there another combiner card, which overlays the menus over the image?

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Excellent question! Both the on screen menu and the mixing palette are handled by the combiner as well. The mixing palette is in one framestore and menu in the other. Combiner simply switches at a particular line number to display them. The cursor is handled by another card. Apparently early in development they had experimented with having the menus slide into view. But used the simple on/off due to it being faster.

@MrVoltz 2 жыл бұрын

@@DextersTechLab So is the frame store larger than a single frame and the palette/menu stored outside of the normal image?

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

Yes, each store is just under 2Mb. The additional space is used for the menus, cutouts, stencils etc. A full screen of data occupies 817,920 bytes.

@roddypratt990 2 жыл бұрын

The cursor is generated entirely by the combiner card. IIRC there's a small ROM on it which defines the shape, colours, shadow etc. As the user moves the pen the CPU tells the combiner card where to place the cursor on the screen.

@electronash 2 жыл бұрын

3:30 - I remember the letter "U" in the service manual looks like a "V". Very confusing. lol Some weird Roman style font they were using back then?

@DextersTechLab 2 жыл бұрын

We think this is probably just a typo, or it was interpreted wrongly by whoever drew up the schematic from the original hand drawn one the design engineer would have made.