The Black Box appears to have been a combined accelerator and 24bit graphics card. It was fitted with a 68040 as well as a Texas Instruments 34020 graphics processor and 34082 graphics co-processor. With enough RAM installed the card could be used to play 24bit animations in realtime.
Example Display Modes
| Resolution |
Depth |
Frequency |
| 1260 x 832 |
24 |
|
About DJW microsystems
David John Westwood was the founder of DJW microsystems (DJW are the founders initials) and the designer of all DJW products.
A little history - Dave used to work at Amiga Centre Scotland many years ago and was involved in the development of the Harlequin board, but left and founded DJW Microsystems.
DJW microsystems used to assemble PCs and sell them but also did some custom hardware development.
The first major product they developed was the Black Box which only really got as far as the prototype stage, it was really designed to operate in the Amiga 2000 and occupied 3 slots in the case - the processor slot, a zorro slot and a PC slot (for power only). We got it operational but very buggy when we were approached by Tritec to act as distributors for us. They were interested in the Black Box, but really wanted a lower cost system and persuaded us to develop the Horizon card.
We got the Horizon working quite well (in terms of hardware), and operating as an Amiga graphics board, but in order to realise the full potential, we needed native software as the controller chip on the board is a full graphics processor (http://www.ti.com/product/tms34020a)
This is the time that we contacted a few programmers from Kefrens in Denmaark, initially to develop a 34020 assembler, but with a view to doing more work as well. I can't remember why this didn't work out, but the guys were really keen and great to work with.
Around this time, the bottom fell out of the PC market and DJW microsystems was in real financial trouble, so we reached a deal with Tritiec where Dave and one other guy became employees of Tritec and transferred the design to them.