MAME Work In Progress - Quantel DPB-7001 "Digital Paintbox", Hard Disk support
20This video is a follow-up to the previous work-in-progress video for the DPB-7001 driver in MAME. Hard disk support is now working, which will make life much easier for installing typefaces and additional brushes. The interface is now considerably snappier as well, now that it doesn't have to spool brushes off of a floppy every time a menu comes up.
Description of the previous video follows:
I've been working on a driver for this off and on for about 3 years now. Recently I picked it back up again and have managed to solve some significant drawing-related bugs, to the point that the system is approaching usable.
The Quantel DPB-7000/7001 was a revolutionary machine used for broadcast-quality graphics generation. It first launched in 1981 at an eye-watering price of around £150,000 (that's over half a million GBP these days). For that, you got:
- A Motorola 68000 main CPU
- A bucketload of additional CPUs: One in the floppy controller, one in the keyboard, one in the drawing tablet, and one in the box to which the keyboard, tablet, and pen all connected
- Upwards of 600k of ROM
- Nearly 4 megabytes of frame-store RAM, split across two banks each of Luma, Chroma, and Stencil storage
- An 8" floppy drive
- A Fujitsu hard drive, 80 megs minimum
- A pressure-sensitive drawing tablet
- An alphanumeric keyboard for console operator control
- A crate of around 20 individual PCBs, riddled with mixed analog/digital discrete logic
- The ability to capture still frames from live footage
The Paintbox was employed heavily by the BBC at the time, as well as being used in the production of various music videos and other media. It's safe to say that it was the product that catapulted the reputation of Quantel in the field of graphics production from a niche player to the forefront.
Thanks to the gracious @DextersTechLab loaning me a physical service manual which holds schematics for all of the cards, as well as flaying open his own DPB-7001 and dumping every single ROM, PROM, and PAL (except one, but we're working on that), emulation has moved forward slowly, but with certainty.