It's Alive!

[Ralph]

vtv14_01.jpg (44.28 KiB) Viewed 4254 times

One of my favorite movie scenes is where Dr. Frankenstein hauls his patched up creation up into the tower on a platform. All this occurs in a raging storm and, as planned, a flash of lightning brings the creature to life. Last evening I managed to do the same with one of my own creations and (fortunately) lightning was not required!

The “creature” in this case was my first NBTV display project that I called the “Virtual Televisor”. It was a moderately simple “black box” that interfaced to a PC via the parallel printer port. I did a great job of displaying real-time NBTV on the computer monitor as well as permitting the capture of individual images in .BMP format. However, like Frankenstein’s creature, the Virtual Televisor had a few key weaknesses! First, the software was a combination of compiled BASIC, along with some assembly language modules, that needed the DOS operating system to run. Not only was DOS seemingly fading into the mists of history, but so were PC’s with a parallel printer port! Besides, Gary’s “Big Picture” software can provide the same functionality in the Windows environment without any interface beyond the ever-present sound card!

The fact is, I loved my Virtual Televisor and I love to tinker, so it was time to bring it back to life. I dug out one of my old WindowsXP computers, created a DOS boot disk (remember disks?), hooked up the Virtual Televisor interface, and it works just fine! Now, as my impending retirement gives me time to tinker, I shall simplify the interface and see if I can port it to Windows!

Meanwhile, for those of you who do not remember the project, I have attached a composite of three images captured from the display. From left to right, the first two are samples of the stock imaged programmed into my NBTV Romscanner. The third (far right) is a picture of Chris (VK3AML) from one of his on-line AVI’s (converted to an NBTV .WAV file using Gary’s software) and stored on a SanDisk MP3 player. As you can see, the player does a fine job as a source of NBTV images!

Ralph

[Ralph]

vtv_grayscale.jpg (35.97 KiB) Viewed 4229 times

I wanted to post a short video showing the Virtual Televisor in action. Unfortunately, the only camera that lets me add the audio produces highly compressed whites and some distortion of the aspect ratio. However, despite these shortcomings the attached video does give an idea of what the sytem does. However, I would suggest looking at the attached photo to get an idea of the systems tonal capabilities.

The video is a segment of one I am working on the demonstrate the Nipkow televisor. That is a more complicated video to produce and it is not quite done!

Ralph