Source of Amiga Video Toaster Software Released

bender writes "About a decade after the release of of the NewTek Video Toaster for the Amiga, OpenVideoToaster is now hosting the source code of the software! The Video Toaster ushered in the age of affordable desktop video in 1991 and was used in products such as Babylon 5 and Jurassic Park."

All well and good, but

[Space cowboy]

the video toaster was basically written around the Amiga custom chippery, right ?

Perhaps you could get some FPGA to do the video work, and recreate the video toaster in all its' glory, unless y'all have them lying around in the attic :-)

OTOH, it's a nice gesture :-) Saves us all from having to buy an Octane from Ebay and register with Discreet, although to be honest, I prefer my Flame :-)

Simon.

Excellent

[heironymouscoward]

It's not about using the software today. It's about the historical record. Software - especially landmark software like this - is part of a common heritage, and should be accessible to all. I'd like to see more companies release the source code for their crown jewels when the commercial exploitation phase has ended.

Open Source Software is one thing

[ajs318]

So now we have the source code for the software, will we get the schematics for the hardware? This could breathe new life in to old Amigas. There must be a few in the backs of wardrobes all over the land .....

Re:All well and good, but

[downix]

Using an FPGA to replace the Amiga custom chips has been discussed for ages.

Noone's gotten it to work. The timing ends up wrong.

Discussing with a former Amiga chipset engineer, they couldn't even migrate the core chip from the ancient fabs to newer ones because when they did, the timing got schewed, rendering the toaster worthless.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you spent time reading my comment and visiting my page if you think it all sucks so much. Don't you have better things to do with your time ?

The Amiga community has an existance the same way QNX, BeOS, Windows, Lunix, BSD and all the other stuff has. There is no need for us to excuse towards others why we do what we do. Some stuff is simply passion and beliving. Like a hobby - We are not in a competition with Microsoft or Apple, we are doing this because we want to do it.

And you are wrong, there are many Amiga applications that are quite good. Even the Desktop experience with Ambient (MorphOS) is far better than the experience I had with GNOME (even when being a long years contributor to the GNOME project and even Foundation Member).

greets,

oGALAXYo

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Pharmboy]

well, im not much of a programmer, more of a wannabe perl hack, but if you "cat FILE |grep fuck" you will find several lines. "this is fucked up, fix it." etc. I would not be shocked if i am the only one. My guess is a real programmer says it more than I do.

I wasn't chips, it was ideas

[NickFusion]

Mainly, the idea that individual persons could make TV. That was a pretty revolutionary thought. It was that crazy idea and the Video Toaster/Lightwave bundle that got me into CGI, and out of Fargo North Dakota, where I was quite literally making industrial videos in a barn.

These days I live in the Boston area, and make games for a living. I don't want to exaggerate the impact the Video Toaster had on my life, but it was pretty significant. And I'm not the only person of that vintage with such a story.

So the real open source idea here is that technology can be fashioned to empower the individual. A somewhat quaint idea in today's multinational world, but one I'm quite fond of.

Bravo New Tek! You made a difference. Keep it up.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[drinkypoo]

It is my understanding that earlier episodes of B5 were rendered on amigas using SN (btw, windows versions of lw did exist while b5 was going on) but that later they used something else to do their rendering. Do you have any idea how many amigas you would need, even with '060 accelerators, to render broadcast quality video clips of those lengths? The power bill alone would justify purchasing faster machines.

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who's downloaded and attempted to use Cinelerra knows that it is far from professional, and hardly ready for even hobbyist use. It lacks a lot of features, the UI stinks, and there's almost zero documentation.

Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[borgheron]

I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but this code is next to useless which is probably why it was released.

I mean this is a program which was big news over a decade ago. Much of the program is in assembler since the Amiga's of the time were 7MHz or maybe 14MHz or 25Mhz, if you were lucky.

Also, the program talks to the hardware of the toaster itself via the Zorro bus, which was a *predecessor* of ISA.

A nice gesture, perhaps a bit nostalgic for those of us, including myself, who once owned Amigas, but, for the most part, totally useless.

GJC

Re:Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[the_arrow]

Also, the program talks to the hardware of the toaster itself via the Zorro bus, which was a *predecessor* of ISA.

The Zorro bus may be older than the ISA bus, but it still had features that didn't come until PCI. Like working autoconfiguration, a.k.a. plug-and-play. And, if I remember correctly, it was a 32-bit bus.