I believe I have completely worked out the internal functioning of the video toaster, a device which nobody has ever been able to explain to me in any detail, and which should not have been able to exist at the time it did and for the price it cost. I did this by thinking about it real hard, and reading six vague sentences from its designer.
The shame is that there's absolutely nobody I could run this by for confirmation other than the guy who designed it, because anyone else who thinks they know would either be completely guessing (but incredibly certain they're right) or would be a crotchety old fuck who would be so rude about what I got wrong that I would delete his email.
anyway i'm pretty convinced it contains nothing more than an analog mixer, two framebuffers and a pair of RAMDACs, and literally everything else is done through extremely clever ways of mapping prebaked bitmaps and lookup tables into values to drive those devices.
I'm going to be expanding on this in the (at this point 28,000 word) video I'm composing on the subject, but I just keep thinking about what I've learned and being staggered by it
the Video Toaster, an addon card for the Amiga which integrates deeply with a piece of software that runs under AmigaOS, has no ability to talk to the Amiga at all. it plugs into the machine's video slot, which is - very literally - equivalent to a VGA port, or perhaps a DVI port. there are no address or data lines. there's nothing at all except sync signals and RGB values. all commands have to be encoded into pixel data. fucking madmen.
