I’ve got my Amiga 1000 setup today with something special. This is the Frame Grabber from Progressive Peripherals and Software (PP&S) and it’s a video frame digitizer that connects to the Amiga over the parallel port. It can create images up to 640x480 in 4096 colors, which was a big deal in 1990.
@paulrickards not too often you see people rocking an Amiga 1000, they're the unloved black sheep of the amiga family. I got myself an American A1000 and popped a Vampire 500+ inside, along with an internal gotek and a pico PSU replacement. Cool, cool stuff.
@GabeMoralesVR That's great-- glad you were able to get an A1000. And with a Vampire inside, it must really be speedy now! The A1000 was definitely quickly forgotten once the 500 and 2000 came along but glad that folks see the uniqueness in being the first. Cheers!
It has a cool feature of toggling the monitor between the Amiga and a preview the camera in real time. It can do this because the monitor loops through it and since the Amiga is based on NTSC video, it all just passes through. Pressing C captures a frame and shows it on the Amiga. From there you can save it as an IFF file and process further with something like DPaint.
Here’s some pictures I digitized. I shot these originally on my phone and then used a centipede of adapters to get the phone’s HDMI video out to NTSC video. It’s easy to see the HAM artifacts. This is 320x400.
In 2013, I explored the greyscale version, called the Frame Grabber 256. I had to make a cable to supply the three needed voltages but it worked.
Last year, one of the creators of the Frame Grabber left a comment on the post that he wrote the software and the basic hardware architecture! What a surprise! He even sent me the original production prototype which looks identical to mine, except no serial number. It works too!
@paulrickards are you the guy who has some kind of instructions on making the power adapter for the Frame buffer 256 online? I remember seeing something about it last year. Mine came without a power supply and I have it on my huge "to do" list to get one working
@10MARC Yep, that's me. My blog with that page is linked in the post you replied to. It's tricky as it needs three different voltages so I used a ATX power supply with a switch.
I've since been lucky to find a color Frame Grabber that came with a PSU so I just use that now.
Good luck with the build, hope the page is useful!
@paulrickards Nice! I had the DigiView with the funky RGB filter wheel / BW camera system… worked surprisingly well though :-) (Still actually have it somewhere but no Amiga ATM)
@harri Ahh, the DigiView was super cool. I remember seeing the DigiDroid system that would automatically turn the color wheel for each RGB color and capture them in sequence.
The FrameGrabber also has the ability to capture separate RGB channels and mix them together, should you have a black and white camera with color wheel.
@paulrickards via... composite? i've always wondered about these on amigas. eric chahi apparently used a genlock to do the animations for Another World on his a1000.
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