Oldschool Amiga Quiz... no prizes, but fun....

Here is a little quiz for you guys... just for the fun and giggles. 😄

Back in these days I used an Amiga 1200 with an M-Tech 030/28MHz with 8MB of fast ram. I used my own Amiga A1200 to create an info-channel for the students (age 13-15). It was a single TV hanging about 2 meters from the ground level that displayed my Scala MM 300 scripts. But I noticed that as soon as I got information from the school that a lecture was canceled, I had to actually go into the big room where the TV was hanging (where all the students were), turn of the TV, go back in, add in the information needed, go back out, turn on the TV (because I did not want to show off the magic behind the scenes).

So... that is where the A500 came into place. With ParNET (yes this was a thing back then for Amigas), you could connect to another Amiga via Parallel port to access files. In this way, I could live-edit the Scala script without interrupting the stream.

Problem solved.

Now to the setup of the question...... I connected the video port from my A500 to the monitor, and used the Composite output from my A1200 to the same monitor (so I could switch inputs of what I needed to see) and used an A500 RF Modulator on the video port on the A1200 that displayed the Info-channel on to the TV in the big room that the students watched.

QUESTION....

Why didn't I use the internal RF modulator on the Amiga 1200? It worked but it lacked one feature that the RF Modulator from the A500 solved...

What feature might that be?

This might give you some clues... (and yes that is me 19 years old when doing this). For reference I am 45 today.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments ... 102775905288382/image.png

Did you do the A520 hack to get svideo output from your A1200?

@ddni

No. :)

Sound? You could stop the A500 modulator outputting sounds as it had a separate input. Although I don't know why that would be important here!

@Chris

You are correct... it had to do with sound. Since the RF500 modulator has an input for it, it also means that whatever source actually works...

If you look at the picture I posted, you can see an audio mixerboard there. So I hooked up both Amigas audio to the mixerboard + a "boombox" with CD and Radio capabilities. This meant that I could then feed the output from the mixerboard to the audio input of the A500 RF Modulator, and then the studends could listen to Swedish National Radio instead of some random Amiga music.

But since the Amiga was connected to the mixerboard as well, certain audio events from the Scala script was heard as well as the Swedish National Radio.

There was actually a postbox bellow where the tv was hanging where students could request things, usually it was birthday congratulations where they had a foto of the student and some text they wanted to be displayed. We had a PC about 3 meters from where my Amigas were and it had a colour scanner, so it was quite easy to make a nice Scala page with the foto and text.

Needles to say, the info-channel became quite popular.

A couple of years after I left they tried to revive the info-channel with PC machines and it wasn't as good as what I created with Scala (I do not think Scala had been ported over to PC at that time).

It was kind of interesting to see how something quite trivial on an Amiga was hard to do on a PC back then when it came to video signals.