shiva@well.sf.ca.us (Kenneth Porter) (04/07/91)
I've received several inquiries about the Systems Concepts CAM-6 coprocessor which I helped design many years ago. I just talked to a friend who still works for SC and apparently SC is in the process of moving to Nevada. SC has never considered the CAM-6 to be a profit center so orders have been given a very low priority (something I disagree with). While you can still place an order, I would not expect to get any response on it. At the time I left SC, I doubt that we shipped more than 30. Some readers have asked me about a successor to the CAM-6 being produced by another company and designed to run in a SparcStation. This is the first that I have heard of this project and would be interested in learning more. With the increasing density of memory and ASIC logic (I didn't have access to the latter with the CAM-6), I'm sure the new card will be much more sophisticated. At the time the CAM-6 was designed, SC was only beginning to get PC's and C compilers were simply unavailable, so the control software was written in Forth by Norm Margolus at MIT, with some assistance from me. We used Forth because (a) it was free (F83 was public domain), (b) we wanted to get something up quickly, and (c) the previous CAM, a wire-wrapped board set designed for an Atari 400, was also controlled by Forth, so we could reuse the old code. I would expect that the Sparc version will be more sophisticated with the presence of much better programming tools. One person asked about dumping the CAM-6 to a printer and doing a video capture to tape. As I recall, one could save an existing bitplane state to disk as a raw bitmap file. You could add code to do the same thing, but with appropriate headers and compression to support a specific bitmap format such as PCX. You could also save an EPS image just by converting the raw bitmap file to hex and adding the appropriate image code (see the PostScript Blue Book for an example). There's a book out called Bitmap Graphics that documents various binary bitmap formats like PCX, GIF, and IMAGE. Once you got it into one format, you could translate it using the PBM bitmap tools (see comp.graphics FAQ for source). The CAM-6 video was designed to work just within the limits of the CGA monitor, with 256 lines of 256 pixels and (I think) 8 or 16 lines of vertical retrace. I suspect this wouldn't be very friendly to a VCR. An alternative is to translate the bitmap and store it in a NTSC-compatible video card, from which it could be taped. This would unfortunately mean that you couldn't take advantage of the processing speed of the card since you would have to stop if after every compute frame to send the results to the video card. Ken (shiva@well.sf.ca.us)