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Cromemco Dazzler

33black

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2011
Messages
207
Location
Los Angeles, California, United States
has anyone ever seen, used, or owned one of these in real life?

the very first ever video graphicas card. pretty neat. how much do you think one would be worth now if even in existence?

i was looking for videos of old demos of the card.
 
has anyone ever seen, used, or owned one of these in real life?

the very first ever video graphicas card. pretty neat. how much do you think one would be worth now if even in existence?

i was looking for videos of old demos of the card.

Not even close to the first, unless you mean on the S100 bus, in which this should probably be better filed under the "S100" category. (Compare, for example, the Tektronix 4010).

They were fairly popular back in the day (think "Game of Life"), so they're probably not exceptionally rare. The downside was the very coarse resolution--and it drank power like a longshoreman boilermakers on Friday night.
 
Hi,
I have a damaged/highly modified Dazzler board set in my basement. However at the rate things are going it to have to wait until my retirement for restoration. It is a neat concept but using video memory over the S-100 bus is a major shortcoming of the design. Of course at the time there was no other practical option.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Although this is knowldege one could get from wikipedia, etc....... From my brain's wiki - There are two other early S-100 cards that used video memory. The Processor Tech VDM-1 and Polymorphic Video Interface (name?). I have used the VDM-1 many times, when my PTCO General Purpose Module was functional. Just a snapshot in time and then better stuff came along. My Poly needs backplane work preventing me from doing much with that co's video card. I have read that it works the same as the VDM-1 but with significant differences in it's implementation.

Bill
 
I think that the Polymorphic Systems card was just called the "Video Terminal Interface". It was used on the Poly-88--and since it was intended to be connected to a TV set, had lines of 32 characters. If you wanted to do graphics, there were 64 graphics characters that mapped the 6 pixels in each character to a specific character, so the effective graphics resolution was 64 x 48. I believe there was a later mod that allowed for 64 characters per line.

There were certainly other such cards by small vendors. A search through the back pages of Byte back then would probably yield more than a few.
 
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