I agree with Kibi - fantastic teardown vid, Dave.
@Kibi - would you be interested in selling one of the DME7000 units at all?
Just wondering roughly how much they would be worth nowadays?
I bought a Quantel Harriet about 18 months ago, but there are a few people I know who might want to buy a DME7000 system.
@funkworm - I hadn't seen your YT channel before - subbed!
btw, have you worked with any Quantel Paintbox / V-Series boxes in the past?
Your name sounds familiar? Have we spoken about the Paintbox before?
EDIT: Ohhh - Big Brother! That makes sense...
http://philtechnicalblog.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/celebrity-big-brother.htmlWould anyone be interested in the service manual for the DME7000?
If people fancy a look, I don't mind paying for it...
http://www.sony.owner-manuals.com/DME7000-service-manual-SONY.htmlhttp://www.manuals-in-pdf.com/download-DME7000-SONY-p-1420398.htmlI've been helping to restore an original Quantel DPB 7001 Paintbox for Steve (RetroGamerVX on YouTube), so I found the Sony teardown fascinating...
That particular Paintbox was used by the BBC for the effects on things like Doctor Who and Tripods.
We're not 100% sure about exactly which programs it was used for, but definitely for a lot of the BBC News stuff / logos / credits etc.
I spent about 5 months reverse-engineering it's 68000 based CPU1 board from two rather grainy photos of the PCB (Steve is quite a few miles away from me in the north of the UK, I'm down in Devon / Mordor).
After I did that bit of RE on the CPU1 board, they guy who donated the PB said he'd found the full service manuals for the damned thing in his loft! lol
It looks like the Sony works in a similar way to the PB, although obviously far more advanced.
The PB uses almost all '74 series logic chips on most of the boards, and some oldskool ADC / DAC / Digital Multiplier chips for the image processing.
It has two main framestores, which consist of 640KB of DRAM each (IIRC).
It then has a separate smaller "Brush" store, which gets loaded with the specific pattern for the currently chosen brush.
During the drawing process, the brush pattern gets multiplied by the image data from one or both framestores, or from a solid colour.
The multiplier for the brush process is taken from the pressure data from the tablet stylus itself.
As you can see in the vid above, it came with a gigantic 335MB Fujitsu SMD hard drive with 14" platters.
We don't yet know what data is on the drive, but we've been told that the whole lot was decommissioned apparently with the data intact.
Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get it to fully boot 'cos it's stuck waiting for the hard drive.
The status lights on the hard drive suggest that it's working fine, so it must either be a cable or interface board issue?
The same goes for the 8" floppy disks - some of the disk covers have actually been signed by the BBC gfx dept.
We've tried to recover the data on them using a PC and adapter cable, but haven't had much luck yet.
A large number of the Tantalum bead caps inside the Paintbox chassis exploded after a few hours of being switched on, so most of those had to be replaced.
And then both the big 1000 Watt original Gould HiFlex power supplies exploded.
So, I had to rig up a "new" PSU based on a big Cisco server PSU.
Most of it runs off +5V of course, but it also needed +/- 12V for the opamps / ADCs / DACs etc., and a -5V supply at quite a few amps.
Anywho - would anyone like to see if the full schematics are in that Sony DME-7000 service manual?
OzOnE.