How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s | Hacker News Reader

How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s

atlasobscura.com

187 pointsrbanffy71 comments

Friends of mine created a popular video game that was run on live TV around the world ("Hugo the TV Troll").

The first version was made for the Amiga. They didn't want the networks to know this because it would not have been accepted as a tv-quality signal, so they got a big flight case on wheels, put the Amiga in there, put a lock and break-out panel on the back, saying that this was a corporate secrecy measure. Networks bought it :-)

Yeah I remember that program. When I saw it it immediately felt like that was something that was probably running on an Amiga, glad to see a confirmation.

I used to watch it in the 90's on Israeli TV!

I watched it in Finnish TV too! I never realized what a global phenomena it apparently was :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_(game_show)

It also became popular here in Spain.

I never saw the program, but it's a pretty cool concept, using a phone as a controller for live broadcast game-play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3MSE8Kde9w

Go back a generation before that and check out TV POWWWW.

Yes, this was pretty hi-tech for 1979:

https://retrobitch.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/tv-poww-the-earl...

I remember Hugo! It was shown on TV for young kids here in Argentina, so I wasn't its target audience (and never really paid attention to it). I never would have guessed it ran on an Amiga!

I remember when I first heard the rumour that Hugo was made on the Amiga, very cool. Looks like you're Danish, but I always thought it was Swedish?

It was Danish indeed :-)

Holy ... This thing was a cultural smash at the time.

I just want to say Hugo the TV troll was so much fun to watch in the early 90s as a kid. I used to always wonder why all the people who dialled into the talk show to play the game sucked so much at the game itself, but I am sure this was because of a massive input lag.

Later I got the game for my PC and played it with my younger cousins and they loved it to bits as well.

There was something so playable about it and the graphics were magical to the watch for young minds.

Awesome story you have about the origins of the game :) Cheers.

Yes, latency. I joined some of the same people later in a spawned-off company that created a similar concept called The Nelly Nut Show (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346350/). We had serious issues selling to the US because there was a required delay of 7 seconds on live shows so that any cursing could be bleeped out. Silly Americans :-D

There was similar concept/copycat game running on Polish TV in late nineties. Between 24 and 6 a premium number letting you call in and waste money playing some fishing? or submarine? game with random prizes.

There was also a "Clube do Hugo" in Brazil! Never would have guessed it ran on an Amiga, by that time PC's were already commonplace. Brazil is a Huge country, but I think most telephone lines at the time were analog, so the delay was likely small enough to allow it.

I used to love Hugo! Always called the station as a kid hoping I get to play with my phone keypad.

When the Video Toaster came out, many production companies had committed to the Mac platform, and pressured NewTek into releasing a Video Toaster for Mac product.

Such a product did come out, in the form of a box that plugged into the Mac's SCSI port with a "special keyboard" for "special commands". The box was, of course, a Toaster-equipped Amiga 2000 with its badge covered by a Video Toaster badge, and the "special keyboard" was the Amiga's keyboard.

I can tell you it was quite popular in Portugal, keeping kids busy during the afternoon.

Tangentially but our local small-town hospital ran its TV system through a C64 system for decades. It was there until the hospital was bulldozed and replaced around 5 years ago. I don't know exactly how it worked but my dad was the engineer at the hospital and explained it was used to provide TV services to paying (private insurance) patients.

All I recall is that whenever a TV was switched on you'd see the C64 load "*" prompt for a few seconds before the picture kicked in. This got me wondering about the guy who set that up, and a bit impressed with how it kept running without issue for so long, since as far as dad could recall they didn't need to do any maintenance on it.

I'm just imagining a dusty C64 forgotten in a crawlspace somewhere with a big "Do not turn off" label on it. I wonder what happened with it, I wouldn't mind seeing the code and setup. (edit - I've sent him an email to see if he recalls any details as he was there from the late 80s onward...)

It's perfectly possible, if the machine was behind a good power stabilized, and in an air conditioned environment, to have it run for a very long time. If he wrote the software into a cartridge, it'd last even longer (as there would be no wear of the 1541)

PreVue Channel also had an ad-delivery platform which served ads for the upper half of the prevue channel. The system was completely “headless”, using an A4000 that you could dial into, and upload new ads etc.

I developed that in 1993 — I think it was called “AdVue” commercially.

It was able to slideshow/carrousel the uploaded IFF/ILBM files or JPEGs, as I recall. I somehow managed to write a dithering algorithm for rendering as HAM8. I don’t recall how I chose the palette seed colors, as I didn’t know proper clustering algorithms back then.

I also somehow pieced together the “BBS” like Zmodem/Xmodem/etc. functionality for uploads. Long live Public Domain sources. This was pre GitHub ;-)

I’ve heard that the system was used for several years in both USA and perhaps Central and South America.

I lost contact with the company after going back home to Denmark.

Oh wow I just had such a flashback....

The first time I ever saw JPEG images was from an Amiga magazine (Amiga Format maybe?) coverdisk. If I recall correctly my A2000 would actually take time to display the whole image - it wasn't instant.

Good times!

I actually went and found the code. It wasn’t JPEG after all, it was Targa, but it still had to be turned into HAM8.

At that time, I had already worked with JPEG on the Amiga, for loading and saving images to/from the GVP TBCplus product. As I recall, it took about a second to load a JPEG image at SD video resolutions, but that was likely with a 68030 or 68040.

There is actually a small community still interested in poking around what little software related to Prevue we’ve found. Did you have any other involvement with the Prevue software?

Fun fact: Ari Weinstein, the fellow mentioned in the article, is the guy behind the Shortcuts app baked into iOS (formerly known as Workflow - which I believe acquired Y Combinator funding). He's a world class prodigy, so seeing him tinker with Amigas before most of us even started Kindergarden is something to behold.

When I was very young, during the early 80s, we had the concept of pirate cable stations. A guy would knock on the door, sign you up (i.e., take a cash payment every month). They then put actual cables from building to building, wiring each flat directly. Then they simply broadcast VHS films they rent rented from the video store. They used a Commodore 64 to type in the film list of the day. Because their signal source was directly wired to all of our's we had to wait for them to type in the film list, watch them make mistakes, correct them etc. I don't think anyone thought twice about the dodgy legality of this. It was just a thing everyone did. And it was the 80s. Lots of things were accepted then.

I love reading about all things Commodore, so I was thrilled to see this article references a long series from Ars Technica on the history of the Amiga: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

They claim it's more interesting than Gates' and Jobs' early computing stories, and that it's filled with dreams, intrigue and backstabbing. Count me in!

I owned a C64, not an Amiga, but at least this bit they claim is true: everyone who owned an Amiga became a fan of it. It's like a cult, in a way like Apple's...

In the US there was definitely a sense of embattlement having something that wasn’t the standard PC. I paid through the nose for a second disk drive and a laptop hard drive that fit under the keyboard. So for that effort it needed to be worth it.

I do remember smugly bragging to someone about it having 4096 colors, and he responded that his Mac Quadra had 16 million.

Was that 4096 simultaneous colors? If so, it would have given VGA a run for its money -- only 256 colors for the active palette (though of course many more to pick from).

Yes and no, there were tricks to displaying nearly all the colors and each row of pixels could have its own palette, but in general use it was 32 colors + 32 half brights.

In HAM mode it could do 4096 simultaneously but that was mostly limited to static images. For games it was 32 or 64 colors.

But this was in 1985. VGA didn’t exist until 1987 and didn’t become ubiquitous until 1990. And was much more expensive.

If Commodore had been properly run they would have had their next gen chipset out by then. But they weren’t, so it wasn’t until 1992 they came out with AGA which was a only little better than VGA and by then it was too late anyway.

A lot of games used more than 32/64 colours using the copper too though. E.g. things like background fades. Interestingly quite a few of the games with the most colours did not use the 5 bitplane 32 colour mode or the 64 bitplane Extra HalfBrite mode, but a combination of "dirty tricks" with sprites + copper.

E.g. Shadow of the Beast used 120+ colours, but used dual playfields, which gives only 8 colours per playfield without anything else. But then it overlays sprites, and uses the copper to change palette repeatedly:

https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

I'm happy to hear that more people are discovering this article series. It was my (very) long-running dream to write this, and I'm happy that Ars Technica supported me during the entire journey. Plenty of Amiga people back in the day ended up having fascinating careers in video, television, and movies, and I'm in touch with (and even working with) some of them today.

Hey Jeremy, I just started reading it and it looks very promising (in fact, I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to read one page more instead of working). Thanks for writing it!

If you really want to read about all things Commodore, pick up Brian Bagnall's books [1]. They're not really for those with a casual interest (though you have the option of the 500+ page single volume first version or the second version which ballooned to a trilogy of 500+ pages each, plus the upcoming Commodore: The Early Years covering Commodore's pre-computing history), and there's plenty of dreams, intrigue and backstabbing (the always fraught relationship between Jack Tramiel and his staff and Irving Gould features heavily alongside a lot of in-depth descriptions of the tech.

[1] Beware, the Amazon listings are a confusing mess; the first edition is "The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge"; the second edition is a massively expanded three volume set, starting with "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" (ignore what Amazon says; it's not book #2), followed by "Commodore: The Amiga Years" and "Commodore: The Final Years". They're all 500+ pages.

Thanks for the recommendation! I've read enough of your comments to instantly pattern-match your username with "this person really knows about Commodore" ;)

The early history of computing has been rewritten by those who survived: Apple and Microsoft. But in reality it was driven by Commodore.

There are others like Bell Labs, DEC, and Atari as well. IBM is sort of implied but worth mentioning.

Don't forget Tandy and Texas Instruments!

The YT link to the Computer Chronicles interview with Tim Jenison and Paul Montgomery of NewTek is dead. Here is an alternate one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWHjfIKD6zA

Enjoyed watching this. I remember seeing a Video Toaster in live action for the first time and it completely blew me away. It really drove home the power of the combination of PAL (or NTSC) video output with the 2^24 color HAM color mode.

No, I looked it up and I got this wrong:

* HAM6 (the original "OCS" HAM, A1000/500/600) supported 4096 colors

* HAM8 (AGA, A1200 / A4000) supported 2^24 colors / around 2^18 simultaneous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify

The Video Toaster “Revolution” video demo’ing the Toaster’s features is beautiful, inspiring (consider the year / tech leap) and is full of gentle self deprecation. The voice over is by Ken Nordine, famed vocal jazz musician.

Recommended, even for the first few minutes!

https://youtu.be/OtYLx6z2eeg

My favorite example of video toaster has got to be tribe called quest's (ft busta rhymes) classic 'scenario'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6TLWqn82J4

they made the entire user interface embedded in a music video back in the early 90s, fun stuff

Thanks for sharing, it’s really great!

It's funny that the appended video for the System 2.0 update contains shots that seem to be very early Babylon 5 scenes. Not sure if these are earlier versions of the models or deliberately altered ones. The copyright date on the video is a year earlier than the show.

they are early models indeed, used for the pilot and for storyboarding with stills. J. Michael Straczynski worked closely with NewTek while developing the show, and contributed a lot of improvements and suggestions to the first editions of Lightwave (included with the toaster..)

The exterior 3D shots were 100% Amiga generated, at least for the first few seasons. Though they did farm the bulk rendering off to Alphas using ScreamerNet (also a NewTek platforms controlled by Amigas) almost as soon as they became available.

other fun Hollywood tie is that the chief engineer of the toaster was Brad Carvey, the brother of Dana Carvey

Brad Carvey was the inspiration for Garth Algar. In Wayne's World 2, Garth can be seen wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt as tribute.

In the early 90s the "info channel" of my local Warner Cable system contained a request, written in strangely familar light blue 40 column text on a blue background, asking for anybody who knew how to format a floppy disk in an Atari 800 to call the local cable company office. I called and made arrangements to meet somebody there. I got my mother to drive me to the office at the appointed time. I met a man who showed us into a room with an Atari 800XL and a floppy drive.

The man explained that they used this computer to make "data disks" to be taken to the "head end", where another Atari 800XL ran the info channel. They'd run out of working disks. The engineer who'd set it up left on bad terms. They didn't know how to format more disks, but they knew that's what they needed because the manual for the software advised them so.

I showed the man how to format a disk. They comped a month of my family's cable bill (though their was some consternation when he found out we had the "premium" package). That may be the first time in my life I did "IT work" and received compensation, now that I think about it.

We got an Atari 800 around 1982 but I believe the 810 floppy drive cost more than the actual computer so we never had one. We did get the 410 program recorder that used ordinary audio cassettes to save and load programs.

Yeah that is my recollection too. As a child, I could never afford one -- but I did learn all the peeks and pokes to make the 410 tape drive play regular audio from cassettes in my basic programs!

Never used the Atari's, but for C64, the 1541 floppy contained a full computer not that much less powerful than the C64 itself (less RAM, obviously no sound or graphics; but you could load code onto the 1541 over the serial port and use it as a co-processor...) in addition to the drive mechanics, and that was pretty normal for computers at the time, which explains why floppy drives were so expensive... Looking up the 810, it seems to be a similar-ish full computer.

(I freaked my parents out with experiments like pulling the CPU and IO chips out of their sockets and swapping them to see what would happen; the 1541 has a 6502 CPU instead of the 6510 in the C64, and 6522 IO chips instead of 6526 - the CPU difference is lack of GPIO on the 6502; the 6522 lacks a real-time clock, which next to no software on the C64 uses)

>They comped a month of my family's cable bill

Gig economy ripping people off even then.

This is a great story!

I had a second job at a computer store in Houston, TX that sold Amigas. The store owner was very aware of the studio TV market and had plenty of software including font packs on hand at all times. But she took it further because we had hands on demo gear including genlockers, a green screen, a flatbed with overhead camera and a Sony screenshot printer.

I just worked weekends but even then I would regularly see visitors from Mexico who were buying for TV stations. People were amazed by the Amiga's video signal quality considering the price but that store sold quite a few to stations on a budget.

The "Famous Amiga Uses" page lists quite a few TV programmes where the machine was in use: https://wigilius.se/amiga/fau/programtv.html

I was looking for (and happy to find in the list) Superball, a small game played on Sat1 in their morning programme (Frühstückfernsehen). People dialed in to "remote control" one of the hosts by shouting "left" and "right" at appropriate times.

I had an Amiga in the late 80's. I remember when the local PreVue guide channel first got a Guru Meditation, and realized it ran on the same computer I had.

My first experience with an Amiga was in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I took video production classes in junior high and we had a freshly minted Amiga 2000 with all the video editing accoutrements. I was blown away by its capabilities. It felt like nothing else on the market at the time.

If you scroll down the article to the third screenshot, you'll see a MEmacs icon. MicroEmacs on the Amiga was what made me choose Emacs over Vi later on in life. A very nice good-buy gift from my last computer where I had to enter date and time manually.

I noticed that as well. The same screen shot shows their choice for the RAM disk icon (which is pretty amusing).

Ah, cool! Thanks. Come to think of it, I also like the green as the second highlight color. It's just a slight derivation from the default orange but very tastefully done.

Always liked tuning in to the Prevue channel and seeing a guru meditation error.

I'm really enjoying this read. Thanks to the OP for submission.

Author of the piece. This was one of my favorite early Tedium pieces, and it was a nice surprise to see it floating around again after all this time. Cheers.

Seeing the computer company of my youth and Prevue Tv, I was hoping it was going to be about that weird set top box (Preview, I think) my parents had for less than a year in the 80s. It and the Uptime C64 subscription I used to have for free as long as I reviewed the games seem more like dreams than reality at this point.

I worked on one of these systems in the early 90s- an Amiga-controlled movie preview channel that played cuts from laser disks. So there was a rack of laser disk players running 24/7. A problem was that the disks in the players at the top of the rack would melt and sag from the heat.

Say what you want about the miracle of TV listings - when you were 10 years old waiting to see what was on Nickelodeon, but the listings were slowly scrolling through the hundreds of channels available, it seemed like an eternity!

In Europe we just pressed Teletext button on the remote.

I clicked expecting to find a mention to Video Toaster, and wasn't wrong.

(2016)

Some prior discussion 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459010

"Das ist ein Gameboy Advance"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com