An Amiga Summer Holiday!
Sir Cliff would have been proud! In the summer of 1988 Commodore
took the Amiga name on the road and offered its services at several
major sporting events across Europe. The Amiga Tele Vision was
packed within a 13 ton Mercedes truck to provide a mobile
television production studio to interested parties. On board, the
computer area was represented by nine Commodore AT 40/40 boxes, and
eight Amiga 2000 systems. Of these, three systems had genlock
capabilities, and two were equipped with video digitizers. All the
computers were connected over an hardware-addressable v24
network.
The television area comprises of two U-Matic high band recorders
and a C-Tape-Machine plus a video mixer and 10-channel sound mixer.
These two areas were combined with the aid of an effects generator
from Pinnacle. This was plugged into a 286 and used a bridge card
to digitize, enhance, and develop footage. This would allow the
producer to combine three 'graphic generator' (the name given to
these devices at the time) signals into one stream and output the
data to tape. The Amiga 2000's were used as slave devices to create
logos and captions. This was an automated process that allowed
users' of the 286 machines to assign the Amigas with various tasks
and leave it to work on its own. Finally the media lab was fitted
with two modems to allow technicians to contact Commodore's
Innsbruck programming centre. Commodore may not have promoted the
Amigas but they certainly demonstrated how it could be used to
accomplish real-world tasks!
Larger versions can be viewed by clicking on the
image.
Computer Equipment Used on the Bus
Computer Equipment
Nine Commodore AT 40/40's, eight Commodore Amiga 2000's. SK network
under Novell, v24 network link to television environment.
Television Equipment
Magnetic tape machine, 2 U-Matic high band video recorders,
connections for three cameras, video mixer, 10 channel sound mixer.
5 combined text and sound generators (Aston 3 & 4, Pinnacle
digital effects system with 200 video image storage capacity, video
plug board with 7x30 serial interfaces for linking built-in
devices.
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