The Ware from September 2025 is a Hotronic AF 75 time base corrector. Really great comment thread, it was fun to read the sleuthing work and thought process behind the guesses. And yah, those SRAM chips make me nostalgic – I remember how expensive those were! Back when 32kiB cost real money.
A couple folks had guessed a time base corrector out of several possibilities, but I like how Guy Dunphy backed his guess up with an explanation of how it works. So, I’ll give Guy the prize this month. Congrats, drop me an email to collect your prize!
I enjoyed the comment “Whatever it was, I’ll bet the Amiga Video Toaster killed it.” But I think almost the opposite is true: The explosion of Toaster-mediated prosumer video probably expanded the market for TBCs. People needed TBCs to connect video tape players to Video Toasters. However, is is more likely that Toaster users would use products like Digital Creations’ “Kitchen Sync” instead.
There’s frustratingly little information out there on this device, additionally complicated by the ‘Hotronic’ brand of battery-operated heated socks.
WRM guessed that it might have been a video delay. Not entirely wrong, but it could only delay for at most one frame. I appreciated that they noticed the ADC and DAC pairs and guessed it was for dual video. Sort of. It splits the incoming composite video into its chroma and luma portions of the signal and handles them separately, hence the two banks of memory and matched pairs of ADC/DAC pairs.
As Guy predicted, the rear panel is pretty simple: Composite in, composite out, a genlock through, and a socket labeled “ADV SYNC”. But it ALSO has SVIDEO IN and SVIDEO OUT, in which case it wouldn’t have to split the chroma/luma itself. This must have come out early in the lifecycle of this signal, before they’d landed on the ‘SVIDEO’ name: The sockets on the back are labeled “Y/C IN” while the button in the front allows you to select between “COMP” or “S-VHS”.
The question I still have is how did this system do concurrent reads and writes to its frame buffer? Wouldn’t that require some kind of dual-ported RAM?
Dual-ported RAM was pretty common in those days (Hitachi’s HM53051 was a favorite of mine for homebrew video hackery.) Not sure if there was anything like that on this board, though.
Maybe they stored chroma and luma separately for composite just because it was the path of least resistance, given that they had to store them separately for S-video support anyway.