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Cromemco TV Dazzler
This was the board that launched the Cromemco company. It was the first home computer color video board and went on in modified forms over the years to be utilized in specific Cromemco graphic applications such as weather charts for TV stations.
This board was a marvel at the time
(1977). Using only MOS & 7400 IC's they constructed a pair of boards that together
allowed nice color graphics to be displayed on a home TV screen. Up until then
the only comparable electronics for the hobbyist were ones based on the
circuitry described in detail in the pivotal Don Lancaster book the
TV Typewriter.
The board was a two board set they were
connected by a 16 pin ribbon cable that ran up and over one board and down to
the next board behind it. The boards accessed up to 2K of system RAM via
DMA putting wait states on the CPU while the info from RAM was picked off. This
RAM location could be anywhere on a 1K boundary in the 64K space. Various
resolutions of graphics display were possible ranging from 32X32 color pixels up
to 64X64 displays. Primitive by today's standards but a marvel at the time. Port
0FH was hard wired as the display format port.
Video output was composite video which
could be sent directly to a composite video input of a TV if you were lucky at
the time to have one with this option or through the TV antennas via a
small RF converter board. They recommended a converter from ATV Research (see
below).
Cromemco also sold a package of simple
games/graphics for the boards. These were supplied on paper tape! or cassette
tape or 8" floppy disks (later).
The manual for the board can be obtained
here.
The manual for the computer games that
ran with the board can be obtained
here.
Information about adapting the board to
work with a TV RF signal can be obtained
here.
Here is an early Byte advertisement for the board.
The manual for the SDI board can be found here.
Other Cromemco S-100 Boards
ZPU SBC 4KRAM 16K RAM 64KZ RAM 64KZ-II RAM 256KRAM 8KBytesaver Bytesaver-II
16KPROM 32K Bytesaver 4FDC 16FDC 64FDC WDI WDI-II STDC
4PIO 8PIO TU-ART D+7A I/O Dazzler PRI GPIB Board XMU XXU Other Boards
This page was last modified on 01/08/2011