steve@cs.UAlberta.CA (Steve Sutphen) (06/05/90)
Some where in our multitude of computers I need to put a "dumb" frame buffer. The requirements for this are: 1) 24 bit planes (or greater) 2) NTSC timing compatibility (for a VAS-V VTR controller) 3) 8-bit frame grab (from a B&W video camera) 4) square pixels (if possible) I could live with either 512x512 (with some missing lines to fit in a NTSC frame) or 640x480. I do not want "high resolution", or any particular smarts. This board is going to be used to digitize the odd video frame, and for generating output that will be hooked to: 1) standard TV monitor 2) Matrix 4007 hard copy camera (RS170 - RGB&synch) 3) VAS-V VTR controller and Sony VTR (with a Lyon Lamb RGB to NTSC encoder). I assume that the user's will be able to generate the "bits" by various means. I have contemplated a few solutions to the problem: 1) Buy a add on board for a Sun. This has a couple of problems: most of our Sun's don't have VME backplanes or S-Bus; VME is expensive. 2) Buy a standalone unit: too expensive, especially as I view this as a network (Ethernet) resource. 3) buy a PC-AT card and put in our MIPS M/120 (we have one slot that is empty). This last solution is what I am now investigating (although I am open to other suggestions). I have not looked into the AT-Bus driver that will be needed on the MIPS end, but it seems that this will work in theory (if anyone has contrary evidence I would like to hear it). The boards I am currently investigating are: 1) Data Translation DT2871-60Hz 2) TrueVision board TARGA-24 3) RedLake SPECTRUM (I have a data sheet but it isn't clear if it will do the 24-bit ouput, it seems oriented to PC graphics). 4) New Media Graphics (once again it isn't clear if this will do what I want). I am open to suggestions of other boards that I may have missed. I looked at the Matrox, but it takes 2-slots and I only have one. So, what I am asking (I think) is: 1) is this a reasonable solution? 2) are there better solutions (unfortunately I don't have much money to throw at the problem). 3) has anyone had any experience putting a device like this (a 1 MByte address space) on a MIPS Machine? 4) are there better boards? I am willing to do a little research to track this down, so pointers are welcome. As this is rather specific mail would be more appropriate than posting. I will summarize if warranted. steve@cs.ualberta.ca