I’m continuing to root through the hoard of Commodore 64 diskette images from the 80s I rediscovered the other day, and I found that the diskettes contained a large number of files called things like DDLARS3. That’s my name! So what could they be?
Well, some Googling shows that the DD files are from Doodle Draw, which I have no recollection of what so ever. But looking at the images (after converting with recoil2png), I’m starting to recover some (possibly false) memories…
I had a digitiser! Or was it called a “frame grabber”? It plugged into the C64 and digitised a one-bit image! In real time! It was like magic! But… er… how did it work? Was it a camera? No, that doesn’t sound likely. Did I borrow a video camera for the images below? Did it plug into the VCR?
I’ve googled a bit now, and I can’t seem to find anything that jogs a memory — and they talk about the digitiser being slow? No, it was real time as far as I can recall? I mean, it showed a moving 1-bit 320×200 image in real time — when you triggered a snap, it took a while to spit out the data so you had to pause it… So I guess it was plugged into the VCR?
Does this ring a bell with anybody?
Oh, I probably have the software to the device on one of the diskette images. Yes!
This must be it? This seems to belong with the “Print Technik Video Digitizer”, which doesn’t look familiar at all, but it was a cartridge that plugged into the C64 and took composite in? So I guess that means that I borrowed a VHS camera from someone…
Anyway, here’s a field of images that must have been captured by this device, whatever it was:
I think I remember asking him to look particularly evil in those last shots… I was going to use him as the villain in a adventure game I was writing.
Speaking of which! I also found some images that were meant as assets to that game, so… enjoy?
Some of those are clearly copied from comics and stuff — that’s a Barks ghost at least… And a house from Stig’s Inferno… Oh, and Maggie from Love & Rockets, but I mentioned that before.
Anyway.