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…
If you ever do restore that computer, please make a (detailed) video that enthusiasts like us will enjoy. Please and thank you!
I’m extremely camera shy and socially awkward so I don’t know if that will happen, though I have often thought of starting a Youtube channel for my various interests and just keeping my face out of the frame, I might be able to stomach that. I would definitely want to at least film the procedure for my own posterity, if I end up putting that together into a proper video and ramp up the courage to release it I’ll definitely post it here as an article.
Morgan,
What tools do you have at your disposal? An oscilloscope?
I’ve watched some of the commodore fix it channels on youtube and old hardware like this can often be successfully diagnosed with fairly simple tools, but they’re also experienced in knowing what signals to look for.
Do you have a schematic?
Could be a passive component, that you can source and repair. If it’s a chip that might be harder to find now…?
I don’t have a scope but I do plan to get one if it turns out to be more than an obvious chip swap or eroded trace. I have a video microscope, solder rework station, Hakko soldering station, and a desoldering pump. The best tool at my disposal is my experience in board-level repair as part of my day job. The second best tool is being a huge fan of Adrian Black, his super-detailed repair videos for various 8-bit and 16-bit computers, including several on the VIC-20, have mentally prepared me for what I’m in for.
Genuine chips for these systems are getting harder to source; I’m hoping that if it is the VIC chip then I can maybe find a donor VIC-20 with a different issue to harvest it from. There are clone chips on the various Chinese websites and on eBay but I don’t want to go down that road as they often have worse performance than the genuine articles.
Morgan,
I got a headless owon USB osciliscope because I wanted to be able to hook it up to a large screen and work with captured data.
If you go this route do not get an owon! Hardware-wise owon delivered the best specs for the price. The hardware is fine and very capable, 1gsps 100Mhz w/12bit DAC…wow. No complaints here. However the software just sucks. It doesn’t support linux, which is on me. I knowingly took a gamble hoping that the java software would run on linux or that I could otherwise use wine, but it didn’t work out – the software depends on flakey drivers that are even difficult to install on windows.
Picoscopes have native linux support and would have been better. But being four times more expensive with half the specs, it just wasn’t a financially viable option 🙁
Since you only need a few MHZ, practically any scope should work. Some have composite video scanline trigger options, which might be nice to have when probing such components.
I do some soldering work as well, but if you do it for your day job your skills will be far better than mine 🙂
I recently got a lamp with large magnification because the lack of good lighting is always an issue and some things are just too small for me to see by eye. I considered a video microscope, but it needs to wait until I can justify the expense. These tools are very useful when you need them, but harder to justify if you don’t use them regularly. One thing I acquired recently even though I should have got it years ago was a carbon filter fume extractor.
Another tool I’d love to own is a 3d printer, but I’m already working with too little space.
Let us know how it works out! I’m not sure that anyone else would care to read about them, but I’ve got some projects I’m working on as well.
I have a ZT-703S on my wish list, it’s the type used by Adrian Black and even though I have a decent multimeter, having one with a scope will help not only with computer projects but with automotive repair (another hobby of mine).
I cheated a little bit with this one, mine is actually an Elmo digital “overhead projector”, it has a super high resolution camera mounted to a base that can output video in several formats, including HDMI, VGA, and DisplayPort, as well as be controlled remotely by a computer or its own handheld remote. It even has video input so you can overlay the camera’s image on top of a video feed (somewhat relevant to the article!), and it can zoom in to a board with enough clarity and power to easily make out sub-millimeter defects in traces and solder joints. They aren’t cheap new, but I got lucky; we got one in at work to resell, I tested it and found it to be perfect for board work, and my boss gave me a phenomenal deal on it at $50. If you can find one of these used at a good price snap it up, it’s more than enough for basic electronics repair.
I have one that works extremely well with FreeCAD and Cura, it’s a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus. You can find it for under $200 these days, and its successors are all good too from what I’ve heard. It is big though, that’s for sure; even though it’s an open frame design it has a large footprint from front to rear. It also requires a lot of manual calibration and tuning; when I have the money I will upgrade to something from Creality or Bambu Labs with automatic leveling and other quality of life features.
With all of that said, there are printers designed for small spaces, at the cost of build plate size. Delta style printers are usually much smaller than traditional printers on the X/Y plane, and they are usually much taller so you can make taller/longer prints with proper design and planning. The Monoprice Delta Pro is the best “cheap” one you can get.
Morgan,
Nice. I wish was more portable. I like a bigger screen to really see the details, but that’s a personal preference.
The one spec I don’t like about that model is “Update Rate：3 Times/Second”. Good enough for store-and-hold, but it would bug me for realtime signal display.
I looked at their website… Yeah looks like a good product but pricey. Even the closeout model is $1249 on sale. I’ll stick with mr. magnifier for now, haha.
I’d be interested but alas not enough space. The community library actually does 3d prints though for a fee and I’ve used them a couple times.
I actually used blender, so I didn’t have to pick up yet another tool. Although I am curious what features I am missing out on by not using the “right” software.
https://ibb.co/0RsBmpN4
The results are so much better than what I was ever able to fabricate by hand. There was trouble printing some finer details though. It didn’t effect the part, but in a previous revision I used a much smaller font text and it was illegible. I’m not sure how much it has to do with the library’s equipment and filament.
Another tool I got recently is a thermal camera to detect wiring issues. It’s more of a nice to have than a necessity for most things, but now that I have one I find that it has lots of convenient applications. For board repair, finding shorts just became trivial. My gripe with the model is that the screen is small and difficult to read comfortably.