Release name: Director-II - Prototype Name: Horizon
The Horizon (prototype) card was released and sold by Tritec as the Director-II, they never really liked the name Horizon, which was the name of the prototype, I don't know why, so actually the Horizon and Director-II are actually the same card. It used to sell for around £400 and around 100 Director-II cards was sold.
Only a few Horizons is known to exist, and the only one outside of DJW's office with the 34082 fitted is the one listed here in BBOAH.
The Horizon was zorro-II based and could display and capture RGB at resolutions up to 1024x768, but mainly video resolutions of 640x480, 702x576, 720x486 & 720x576. The 25-pin D is the video output and the 9-pin din is the capture input. The 2 DIN-41612 connectors at the top are for expansion cards which never really happened on the Horizon but we had a whole range up and running on the Avatar.
We also got very close to releasing the successor to the Horizon which was the Avatar.
The Avatar was zorro-III based and could display HD in addition to the above modes plus it also could do image scaling and mixing on board with YUV, Y/C and composite display and capture on board too. We also had M-JPEG compression and decompression add-on cards, MPEG decode cards along with processor and video memory expansion cards.
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.