The Avatar was a Zorro III only graphics card, however it was never released to the public. It supports 24bit, and resolutions up to 1600x1200. It contained Composite and Y/C in both PAL and NTSC as well as YUV and RGB connectors with support for MPEG compression to hard disk with image capture. The card also supports EGS as well as Opalvision and Harlequin emulation. It also contained a built in genlock.
Despite never reaching market, the Avatar featured cutting-edge capabilities for its time, including:
- Resolutions up to 1600×1200 and beyond
- Up to 32-bit color depth
- Hardware MJPEG compression to hard disk
- Image capture functionality
- Full genlock support
- Composite, PAL/NTSC, Y/C (S-Video), YUV video I/O
- Support for EGS, as well as OpalVision and Harlequin emulation
The board was densely populated with advanced video and image processing components. Notable hardware includes:
- TMS34020 graphics processor (a programmable graphics CPU from Texas Instruments)
- Support for up to 128 MB of processor RAM via a 72-pin SIMM (prototype equipped with 8 MB)
- Four custom VRAM SIMMs from Digital Graffiti Ltd for image storage
- Three HSP48212 digital mixer ICs
- Two HSP9501 delay devices for precise timing against external video reference
- Two Lattice ispLSI 11048 FPGAs
- SAA7192 color space converter (RGB ↔ YUV)
- Bt254 video digitizer (RGB/YUV input)
- Bt858 video encoder (composite and Y/C output)
- Bt812 video decoder (composite and Y/C input)
- TVP3010 digital video output
- S4503 video clock synthesizer
- Dual 16-bit Flash ROMs
- Reserved board space for an image warping processor that was never implemented
The Avatar was intended to offer high-quality video digitizing, playback, and manipulation, aimed at professional multimedia applications. A PC version was also planned, but never realized.
Unfortunately, the only prototype has suffered from battery leakage and some loose modifications, making it unlikely to be repairable today. The original software is also lost.
Background
The Avatar was intended to offer high-quality video digitizing, playback, and manipulation, aimed at professional multimedia applications. A PC version was also planned, but never realized.
Unfortunately, the only prototype has suffered from battery leakage and some loose modifications, making it unlikely to be repairable today. The original software is also lost.
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.