This is a crude video frame capture device from
1989for the Commodore 64.
It plugs into the user port, and allows you to feed in NTSC composite video to be digitized in 2-bit grayscale. After that, you can apply the C64’s 4-bit color pallet to the color.
Remember how I said it takes about 4 seconds to capture? If you can’t feed it a still image, the results are going to be all garbled, so you need either a still image on the screen from a VCR. That, or you have some way to freeze a signal using a piece of specialized piece of broadcast kit. However, the manufacturers expected you to use this entirely differently: treating it almost like a digital camera. You were intended to connect this to a video camera, and set up a still scene, then use your Video Byte II to capture that scene.
After that, you can tweak the color pallet, shift the capture frame in software, and adjust the lighting. When you’re done, you can print it out, or save it as a Koala Paint compatible image for further editing (other formats were supposedly in the works)
So for the next few days I will be posting digitized photos (mostly my work) under the tag #video byte II
Alright, there’s the whole image set for now. If you missed any, be sure to check that tag to see all of them.
