Cameron Kaiser comes in with another amazing article, this time diving into a unique video titler from Canada, released in 1985.
The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32×16 small or 10×4 large character layer with 64×32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you’ll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture.
More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own — though we’ll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there’s also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we’re done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We’ll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly … after we fix it first.
↫ Cameron Kaiser
I know I keep repeating myself, but Kaiser’s work on so many of these rare and unique systems is not only worthwhile and amazing to read, they’re also incredibly valuable from a historical and preservation perspective. This article in hand, anyone who stumbles upon one of these machines can get the most out of it, possibly fix one, and use it for fun projects. I’m incredibly grateful for this sort of work.
Video titles are such an interesting relic of the past. These days, adding titles to a video is child’s play, but back when computing power came at a massive premium and digital video was but a distant dream, using analog video to overlay text onto was the best way to go about it. Video titler makers did try to move the technology from professional settings to home settings, but from what I can gather, this move never really paid off.
Still, I’d love to buy one of these at some point and mess around with it. There’s some real cool retro effects you can create with these.
I have a Commodore VIC-20 I keep meaning to drag out of the shed to repair, that spent most of its early life in the 80s as a video titler. It belonged to my ex-wife’s father, and she inherited it when he passed (long before we met). When we started dating and she noticed my love of ancient computers she gave it to me along with a bunch of peripherals and such. She had fond memories of him using it to generate titles for their home videos, as well as doing it professionally for churches and other organizations in the area, but she was never into the technology itself and had no attachment to the computer and various parts.
It isn’t outputting video anymore; I wonder if it’s the VIC chip itself that’s bad, but I won’t know until I drag it out and get to work on it. One more retrocomputing project in a long list…