DPS Personal Animation Recorder reverse-engineering: info needed
 

Following Starglider 2's recent post, I have been looking at the Personal Animation Recorder program code, with a view to documenting how the board works. In future it may be possible for emulators to support it, at least to the extent of playing back stills & animations.

I don't have the original hardware. If anyone does have a PAR card, PAL or NTSC, here are some things that would be useful to see:

• High-res pics of PAR boards with text on all the chips legible. The pics on amiga.resource.cx aren't clear enough.
• PDF/scans/pics of any manuals other than the installation manual. Was there a separate manual for the PAR software?
  
• Image files of PAR IDE drives. In the future it may be possible to use custom software on the Amiga to do that, without needing to disconnect the drive from PAR board. But for the time being, disconnecting the drive and connecting it to a PC for imaging would be easiest.
  
• Files copied from the same PAR drives. With the PAR software running, it should be possible to copy files from DD0:/DD1:/DDR: to a normal partition, from where they could be archived/uploaded.
  
• Screen grabs of the various screens/windows in the PAR program, done using a screen-capture program on the Amiga. That will be helpful for figuring out which routine handles each gadget.

How are these?

Would definitely be nice to get this reverse engineered. Granted, I am in the middle of trying to get mine configured to work right.

Thanks! The PAR2.jpg image was much sharper than PAR1.jpg, but most of the chip text in the blurrier one was still readable.

My initial fears about PAR cards proved to be correct.
This card was made possible by using FPGA's. If the programmable logic chips have their "let noone read my contents" flag enabled, or if they are plain write once PLC's, I guess there is no way one could reverse engineer the card given the lack of documentation and the scarcity of software written for it. You already know that those chips are bought blank and they have to be programmed to do their jobs.

Unless the company who made it releases the bitstream files or the actual design files, I can't see how one would invest the huge amount of time required for reverse engineering the PAR card.

It won't be necessary to figure out how the card works at a very low level. Working out the communication protocol could still allow some useful things:
- Ability to create image file from PAR drive without needing to disconnect it from the card, similarly to write an image file back to the PAR drive.
- Allow an emulator to fake enough of the board's responses to allow the PAR software to think the board is present. Then you could use it to extract/convert images and animations from a PAR drive image into a more useable format.

The available pic of a PAL PAR board shows a Zilog Z8 microcontroller. I'd like to see whether the NTSC board uses the same chip, but the pics don't show it. If that chip is present it's probably covered by a label. If anyone with a PAR is prepared to remove the chip labels, that could help.