The Ware for September 2025 is shown below.
Thanks to Michael Dwyer for submitting this ware! I originally contemplated only showing the digital board to make the ware more challenging, but the analog part is so chaotically gorgeous I had to share it out of the aesthetic appreciation.
Despite the size and complexity of the system, there is no CPU. There was a day and age where it was fairly common to design systems without one. In many cases, a ROM-based FSM was more economical, offering better performance and consistent timing. This gave them an edge over MCUs when the flexibility afforded by a programmable instruction set was offset by higher component costs and the difficulty of working with variable-length, multi-cycle instruction execution timings.
My guess is some kind of industrial-grade video or TV broadcast equipment from the early 90s. Given the form-factor, seems like it would be rack-mounted.
The top board has a whole bunch of 32KB SRAMs, plus a couple of TDC1038 “Monolithic Video A/D Converter” chips. Sampling an analog video signal (or two) and capturing frames into a buffer?
The bottom board also betrays a purpose for video, as it features a 14.31818 MHz crystal, which is a classic way of generating an NTSC colour burst signal (divided by 4 = 3.579545 MHz).
But what the system might be doing with a digitised capture of one or maybe two video signals, I have no idea.
I don’t know how you were able to pick out that crystal in all that noise. Now that I know it is there, I can’t un-see it, but mostly my eyes just slide off analog stuff.
Nice hit on the TDC1038N6C, too. I always assume that the digits on the top line are the ones that matter and the lower digits were just production garbage. I ignored the correct lines and wasted time searching for 9D9D39HA.
Signal gets processed by a bunch of analog magic before being fed to the aforementioned two video ADCs which are good for 20 MSps. Lots of RAM and octal latches, and looks like the digital bits then go back to the analog board where there happens to be 2 x TDA8702 video DACs.
12 x 32k at let’s make it 14k31818 samples per second is maybe one and a half frames if I didn’t drop a decimal along the way.
So it’s not a broadcast delay. Good grief I woulda done terrible things for that much RAM back in the 8-bit era and it can’t even store 7 seconds… :-)
So let’s guess. Dual video… genlock? Time base corrector? _Maybe_ a time-division scrambler similar to my Brown Boveri Cryptophon, but for video? But I doubt that.
It seems that the front panel has six push buttons on the left, maybe with an unlocking mechanism so only one is pushed at a time. On the right, there is a toggle switch and four potentiometers. In the middle, maybe a few seven-segment LED displays.
I’m really just guessing, but maybe the device can insert previously captured stills or graphics into a TV signal, and you can choose which and maybe fade in and out, or adjust the height/width or position of the images to be inserted.
I wonder if it is an early Dolby Digital decoder unit. These take a video feed of the little “QR Code”-like packets of data which are printed between the sprocket holes of 35mm film and decodes the audio.
The date codes on the chips are a little too early for any models I can find board shots of, though.
Not much else to mention, except that the paint on the metal tab at the top of the digital board, and also a thin strip along the right side of the analog board looks like good old Tektronix blue. They made a lot of video gear. I looked through the 1994 catalog but did not see anything with a front panel layout as shown here.
And all those trimpots! Plus the adjustable coils and 3 strips of DIP switches. Job security for whoever had to do the alignment of these!
Something from the Tek spinoff Grass Valley Group, maybe. Frame store, title/Chyron generator?
Looks like that’s the right company, at least. The board near the bottom of the page at https://vintagetek.org/grass-valley-group/ has similar lettering and overall look-and-feel. GIS on ‘grass valley group pcb’ brings up some very similar-looking boards, but no exact matches as far as I could see.
Whatever it was, I’ll bet the Amiga Video Toaster killed it.
I’d guess an NTSC video Time Base Corrector (TBC) system.
A TBC takes in composite color video that is locked to one reference color subcarrier (with the horizontal and vertical syncs derived from that carrier), and outputs the video frames locked to a another color subcarrier and its own set of syncs. That will be in different sequence to the original video stream.
The source video may be from a video tape machine, or some external (broadcast or satellite) signal.
The output video will usually be locked to the studio master reference.
Each video stream will be on a single 75 ohm coax via BNCs. The output video side will have a set of reference carrier and sync input BNCs on the unit.
The NTSC color subcarrier is 3.579545MHz. It is quadrature-modulated by two color-difference signals and added to the luminance signal. NTSC gear uses crystals that are 4 times the subcarrier, ie 14.31818 MHz, since the process of generating the phase relationship between the subcarrier and the H & V sync requires a 4x reference. Also a ‘frequency subtraction’ step done using four-quadrant multipliers (I see several MC1495 ICs) and quadrature sinewaves.
I see TWO 14.31818 MHz crystals on that analog board, expected since the system needs to deal with two independent video signals. They’ll be phase-locked to the video or external refs using varactor diodes.
The PAL television standard uses a subcarrier frequency of 4.43362MHz, hence reference crystals of 17.73448MHz
One major composite video gear manufacturer was Leitch. They used a blue paint on their cases similar to the Tektronix blue.
TBCs were often in 1U rack mounted boxes.
Unfortunately I don’t have a collection of Leitch TBC service manuals (I wish i did), or I might be able to identify that unit exactly.
Dating it – hard to make out IC date codes, but I see 74-LS,AS,ALS,HC types and ’90’ date codes.
I take back the ‘Leitch’ part. I just opened up a Leitch SPG-141P Sync pulse generator from around 1984-86. Totally different construction style to this ware. For one thing the PCBs are the same blue as the front panel. Plus the white PCB silkscreen includes plenty of functional labelling of things like trimpots.