[QuadList] OT: Chiron III (Was: Seconds to Play: 2" quadplayback and more.)

[rabruner at aol.com]

The basic architecture of the run-length coded Chyrons depended on a series of alternating operations. There was a board to generate the first scan line of a character, then another board generated the second line, the first board generated the third line and so forth.  Then you had boards that assembled alternating fields, etc.  The RGU did all these operations in one board per layer, which made it slower.  A real sports operator could get ahead of the machine, and it would just hang up and need a power cycle to get it going again.  The RGU that we had at WGN suffered from connectoritis in the IC sockets as well. The cure sent out by Chyron was to shove an Augat machined pin socket into the original socket and then put the chip back into that.  It sorta helped, but wasn't a solid fix by any means.
The CPU was based on running four 4-bit CPUs in tandem to make a 16 bit cpu.  I believe the instruction buss was something like 81 bits wide and did several operations on each machine cycle.  The bible of the CPU was a book called "Bit Slice Microprocessors" by Mick and Blick.  I still have a copy around the library somewhere.  
    Chyron had a kit to fit hard drives into several of the later machines, I think. 

Bob Bruner
WTTW/Chicago






Attached Message


From:
Scott Thomas <scottgfx at mac.com>

To:
Quad List <quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com>

Subject:
Re: [QuadList] OT: Chiron III (Was: Seconds to Play: 2" quadplayback and more.)

Date:
Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:38:30 -0400



Neat information about those earlier machines. Thank you Bob.


In reading that other information I found from Wikipedia, all those early machines were based on the same microcomputer.
I searched and found this PDF: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/datamate/DM70_RefMan.pdf


Very little info otherwise. I'm curious why they chose a architecture from a company in west Texas?


Did not know the RGU was based on the same architecture. A local production company in Fort Myers, FL had one. Never heard much positive about it.


The CBS affiliate WINK replaced a 3M D-8800 with a Chyron 4100-EXB around 1985. Any idea what EXB stood for? I know they had the MGM option.
in the 1990's they kept it going with 5.25" drive conversions and even added a hard drive to it.


They finally replaced it with a 3 channel Infinit! around 1996. I have stories about that machine. The drawings for the Infinit! call it a multi-user Scribe.
Motorola 680x0 based and on the VME bus. No more wire-wrap!


What made the Scribe and it's followers different wasn't the bitmap characters. It was the use of vector fonts. You could build the bitmaps (Machine Fonts) from a vector database at any size you wanted. I remember when CNN moved into the Omni in downtown Atlanta. They moved to the Scribe at the same time. I watched them the morning of the switch. It really made a difference.


I remember it taking a long time to render those fonts on the CPU's of that time. Now, all these modern personal computers do this in the blink of an eye. :)


I found a Chiron II and III ad in the Broadcast Engineering scans of David Gleason. What is his policy of posting clippings from the scans? I do not want to run afoul of the wonderful work he's done.


Scott Thomas 






On Jun 10, 2012, at 11:36 PM, rabruner at aol.com wrote:


I believe the gray Chyron keyboards shown in the film are Chyron II keyboards.  The III, IV, 4000, 4100, 4200, and RGU all had similar ugly orange and beige keyboards. There is nothing magical about the keyboards and they could have used Chyron ii keyboards with Chyron III frames. 
 
The II keyboards were long and thin as shown, whereas the IIIs that I am familiar with are big and boxy. So there would have been some space advantage in using the gray keyboards building a truck.  I think the keystroke coding boards were all the same, it was the interface to the frame that changed a little.  The characters we see could be from Chyron IIIs.  The II through 4200 (and RGU) all used the same kind of run length coding to describe the characters.  Bit mapping presentations didn't come along until the Scribe.  
 
The III was a somewhat dumbed down version of the II and the 4 series were repackaged versions of the II.  The 4100 was similar to the 4000, but it could have an accessory called MGM (Multi Graphics Module, I believe), which was another box about the same size as the CG, which allowed still captures and animation and video import.  The 4200 was a 4100 with MGM in the same box.  
 
There was a chronic problem through several generations of Chyron keyboards with the internal 5 volt supply drifting low in voltage and needing to be tweaked back to 5 volts.  You would get erratic keyboard performance or nothing from the keyboard until you set the voltage back up and then all was well. 
 
Bob Bruner
WTTW/Chicago







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