CompuServe Messages

Although encoding and decoding NTSC is very simple, it is very hard to do it right. Even the best of the off the shelf encode/decode chips used in the VGA to Video products do not put out anything that you would want to actually broadcast. And I'm sure Commodore was using earlier, less expensive parts for the Amiga video outs. <g> The 4000 and 1200 composite video does look pretty good however. From the quality of the signal, I think Newtek spent a lot of time on the video encoding/decoding circuits. They improved it with the analog filter circuitry in the 2.0 version and again when the Toaster 4000 hardware came out. I believe it was Mark Randall whom I saw publicly state that Newtek had been offered a lot of money to do a port of the Toaster and he said that they would never do a PC Toaster. So I figured there was a technical reason the Toaster, IN IT'S PRESENT FORM, would not work in a PC. Now that's not saying that a PC card could not have the same basic funcionality as a Toaster, just that Newtek won't be moving the Toaster technology in it's present form to the PC. *SPECULATION ON* I'll bet they have dropped any hardware development work on the Amiga and have been working to develop new Mac (1st), and PC (2nd), technology from scratch for some time. If they're not, that may be why a lot of top peple abandoned ship. *SPECULATION OFF* And, just to restate this, there is a technical reason why there is no PAL Toaster. The Toaster is very dependent on the NTSC color encoding scheme. When an RGB graphic is written to the Toaster's frame buffer, the software acually calculates what the digitized NTSC signal would look like and writes that into the framebuffer. If they rewrote their software, they could probably write a PAL signal to the framebuffer. With hardware mods, they could output PAL. But… no DVE wipes. PAL uses a different color encoding method. The clever trick Newtek came up with for doing all those <continued>