OpalVision roaster chip - anyone got one?

[chiark]

Hi Folks
Does anyone have an opalvision roaster chip, or has had one? Reason I ask is that I got to play with one for a day in 1995, and it really should have been outstandingly successful.

Does anyone know the story of why it never made it into production?

(I documented my day with the opalvision roaster and white knight technologies for CU Amiga - now on binary devotion with grabs )

 

[Kin Hell]

Newtek might be able to tell you the full/real story, or anyone from the Golden days of Computing with Video. Afaik, the Roaster Chip never saw the light of day & was never available commercially after the card was released, despite it seeing a couple of Revisions. There were some serious hardware expansion packs for the OpalVision making it a better product than Newtek's Video Toaster as it would do either PAL or NTSC. However, it was much more expensive solution & is probably why it stayed vapour-ware.

Do a Google search using opalvision roaster.

Kin

 

[chiark]

Cheers Charlie. Funnily enough, I already tried google but couldn't get much sense...

 

[Kin Hell]

It's all got scattered & a lot has been deleted now.

There appears to be little about it but trawling the forum results may help.

Anyone in Oz know anything about this product. I'm sure it was an Australian development.

Kin

 

[Slayer]

Yes, we had high hopes for this development back in the day.

I still have an Opalvision card in one of my boxed A4000s.

I used to render animations using widescreen (to up the frame rate) through the Opalvision hardware

 

[chiark]

it was a great card.

And the effects it could put out were astonshing - those wipes on the article were damn good. 720x288 resolution...