Can a NeXTdimension board record s-video (from a VCR) in reasonable quality? I can't find any information about this, but I guess the C-Cube chip was important to make this happen?
I've just got a NeXTdimension board, it's going to be a few weeks before I can actually get it going, but I'll be doing some restoration and setup and trying it out.
I live in a PAL region, and my NeXTdimension would be NTSC. It's probably not all that important, but has anyone tried converting from one to the other?
Quote from: jdswain on July 25, 2024, 04:24:15 PMI live in a PAL region, and my NeXTdimension would be NTSC. It's probably not all that important, but has anyone tried converting from one to the other?
You can change between NTSC/PAL by populating either R131 or R132 with 1k.
Probably you have to change the oscillators Y1 and/or Y2.
Quote from: jdswain on July 25, 2024, 04:24:15 PMCan a NeXTdimension board record s-video (from a VCR) in reasonable quality? I can't find any information about this, but I guess the C-Cube chip was important to make this happen?
The NeXTdimension without the C-Cube chip is not fast enough to record live video, you can just grab a few frames per second, maybe just 1 . Take a look at NDCamera.app :
https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/graphics/video/_NDCamera.0.21.README.html (
https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/graphics/video/_NDCamera.0.21.README.html)
Maybe we could replace the C-Cube chip by a R-PI compute module ...
It'd be great to see an RPi used for some Next stuff, either as an accelerator (Pistorm?), a graphics board (ZZ9000; RGBtoHDMI), or coprocessor!
Does anyone have a C-Cube daughterboard? Or even a photo, or a schematic.
Looks like there are still some CL550 chips available, so it might be possible to recreate the adapter board.
From what I have read, the official reason why this wasn't shipped was a three month delay in getting chips, but other people say that there were reliability problems, it would be interesting to see if it does work as described.
Another option would be a FPGA recreation, but since we can still get the chips, this would be a very time consuming task, and for the number of people interested in it, I don't think it would be worthwhile.
Another interesting alternative, as discussed above, would be to integrate a RPi zero into the socket, but I don't think this would be possible.
RPi has H264 encode/decode hardware, NeXTdimension is expecting MJPEG. If we had the source code to the NeXTdimension we could maybe update this, giving NeXTdimension H264 capabilities, but without the source code this would be very difficult. There is a leaked version of the source available, but it is for NeXTstep 2.0 and the release notes say it only works with 68030.
RPi expects video I/O through HDMI, NeXTdimension has a 24-bit parallel bus for video. There are not enough GPIO pins for this, maybe an I/O expander could fix this, but it's getting more and more difficult.
It would be amazing to see a NeXTdimension doing H264 video, and maybe possible if we could find NeXTstep 3.3 source code.
https://github.com/MelkhiorVintageComputing/NuBusFPGAbut adapting this to NeXT and writing software for both ends will be ... uneasy (looking at other projects at 68kmla).
Also found reference to old card/software that was NOT NextDimension for working with live analog video:
http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartyHardware/ScreenMachineII%20/ScreenMachineIIVersion2/ScreenMachineIIVersion2.html