Esteemed coders,
Looking for some fame?
Here's a crazy thought: a v4l driver for the old TARGA video boards made
by Truevision! Has anyone else out there dabbled with such a crazy
idea? Has anyone else out there ever done any coding? I have access to
nearly the entire line up to the TARGA2000 EISA board--all of which are
severely outdated and no longer supported by Truevision, which is now (I
think...) a Pinnacle subsidiary of some sorts. The thing is, these
video cards were quite expensive indeed, and very capable at the time,
and still remain in use by thousands of digital imaging professionals
with software such as HiResQFX, Rio, Panorama, Lumena, and others. I'm
doing hardware support for one such professional, and we're constantly
running into problems as the base machines get upgraded (because he can
still make a fair amount of money doing his magic with these old cards
and old apps) but we have to cripple them with nasty things like NT3.51
or even DOS to provide the environment in which these old apps work.
You can probably imagine how painful it is to install an M$ operating
system on such nice hardware.
What a wonderful world it would be if all these users of otherwise
high-end, specialized systems could take fuller advantage of modern
computer hardware by having support for these still-useful NTSC boards
under a REAL operating system! Broadcast quality rendering and
frame-grabbing, and a chance to expand v4l (and v4l2, of course) into
new markets! Obviously, there's a fair amount of self-interest here: I
have no great desire to continue to configure dual-boot NT/DOS machines,
and this photographer friend of mine has several older TARGA boards
sitting around that I'd love to be able to put in a Linux box and make
use of, but there's not a scrap of TARGA support under Linux that I've
been able to find on the web. I can only hope that support can be
crafted under a GPL.
And...I'm not a programmer. To be even more brutally honest, I have
almost no idea what it would take for someone who is a programmer to be
able to interface with this ancient hardware. I do know they're
Brooktree based, if that can whet your appetite, but I doubt I'd be much
more helpful than a cheerleader in such a programming adventure, though
I'd happily do what I could, including testing, and maybe even trying to
get technical data about ports and such. (Ok, so I taught myself x86
assembly back in the early eighties, and I am a hardware technician who
specializes in old stuff, but I think I have some sort of genetic block
against being able to understand C, and I've decided to become a
botanist and follow my mom's hobby instead of my dad's for now.)
But...I really really would love to see TARGA support in v4l, and I'd
wager a guess that my photographer friend (an authorized Truevision
dealer, by the way) would be willing to help quite a bit, too. I'm sure
you're thinking that it'd be great to be able to have one of these
boards on loan for development...well, convince me the goal is
achievable, and I'll see what I can do towards that thought!
Any takers? Contact me via email if you wanna chat about
this...please!! (self-interest is a strong motivator..)
-P
p.s. If you want a sample of the low-level interface to the TARGA+
board as an example, take a peek at
http://thorkildsen.no/faqsys/docs/targa.txt for a listing of the control
ports and their parameters. At first I thought maybe an XFree86 driver
would be a neat idea, but I really think a v4l interface would be more
useful...just a thought. Systems with TARGA boards are most often
dual-monitor systems anyways.
