[QuadList] OT: Chiron III (Was: Seconds to Play: 2" quad playback

[rabruner at aol.com]

Texas has been a source of logic devices for some time, so I am not sure what would mitigate against using technology from there.  I don't think the chips in the Chyron II were exactly the same as the later machines, but the bit slice concept was the same for sure, as was the practice of using run length encoding up through the 4200.  It's hard to keep track because Chyron kept updating the machines all along.  A later, fully updated Chyron II was a pretty sophisticated machine, at least as far as the digital part of it went.  All those Chyrons were plagued by a relatively slow clock speed, around 27 Mhz, and mechanical glitches in the machine-insertable IC sockets.  Pulling boards and pushing two or three hundred chips back into the sockets was a regular routine with all of them.  

Speed was the biggest downfall of the system, especially in sports production. It could take a bit of time for the pages to build themselves from the 8-inch floppy drives.  That led Chyron to develop "Sports Fast" a file system that had dedicated space on the disk for each page.  The fact the system didn't have to go all over the disk looking for pieces of a page made it read much faster, it also avoided jumps and stutters on rolls and crawls.  The downside was that the disk layout gave you a finite amount of space for each page. The original disk system was a FAT like system that let the size of the page on the disk expand and contract, at the expense of spreading material all over the disk.  Fragmentation became a real problem after a disk had been used a while and you would need to periodically re-initialize the disk. 

I think 'EXB' basically meant it had the MGM unit.  There were other enhancements that went along with that, but I don't recall what they were.  It ran a different software than the original 4100.  I recall that if you had a client come into the truck with a disk built on a 4100, you would have to boot the machine on their 4100 system disk, the pages wouldn't read correctly if you loaded system from the EXB disk.  
     Those machines only made basic color bar colors.  The output of the frame was TTL video pulses that were fed into a board that made 75% color level RGB that was fed to the red, green, and blue input of a simple NTSC encoder along with sync, subcarrier and blanking.  The output was exact, you could wipe between color bars and the Chyron in the primary and secondary colors on the screen and they would line up with the vectors exactly.  
     As for the Scribe and Scribe Jr., I remember them well,  they came with master font disks and you would build your user fonts in whatever size you wanted from the master disks.  One of the sales points of the Scribe was the fact that all the master fonts were Morganthaler fonts ("metal fonts"), so they would match exactly, as the theory was, text used in print ads, etc., eliminating the need to put in critical text with art cards. on commercial production.

Bob Bruner
WTTW/Chicago



	
>>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 



 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://quadvideotapegroup.com/pipermail/quadlist_quadvideotapegroup.com/attachments/20120612/c8d7e01f/attachment-0004.html>