History - ACS Harlequin Framebuffer circa 1989/90

If any of you ever heard of the Amiga Center Scotland "Harlequin" frame buffer product, I'd like to share both some music and history of that era that might be interesting to some of you.

Harlequin started off as the brainchild of Jan Jones - back around 1986/7, in Oxfordshire, UK, he and I would watch SigGraph videos and wonder how we could make such cool graphics. We loved the things Eric Graham had done with Amiga raytracing but we had always wanted more. Jan researched into what it would take and brought the idea to myself and Alan Tucker and, being the 16 year old, full-of-hope chaps we were, we decided to have a go at making something, with Alan being the engineer, seeing as he had the most technical knowledge of circuit boards (and a room full of LS chips and vero board)

Around 1987 Alan had a VERY early prototype working. Bear in mind he and Jan were at college and I had just started a low-paid job - we couldn't afford proper electronics all the time, so our circuit boards would include LS chips pushed through cereal boxes and crocodile clips connecting them. As things started to take shape I was working more and had to take a part-time interest in what was happening. Andrew Moss came in and helped out at this point, so I stepped out more as other demands competed. The next thing I remember is Jan calling me to say that ACS had seen the prototype and wanted to fund its development. He had convinced Andrew that they had to use his A500 because no-one wanted to sacrifice the A1200's and the A1000s we had weren't compatible.

A while later Jan called me; "hey we're doing a promo video and need some music - could you write some?" - at the time I had A1200, Music-X and a Yamaha SY-22 synth and in about 2 days wrote a demo piece and sent it over - I got a nod that people liked it and I should develop it more, which I did... but the video never materialized and the music has remained dormant... until now. Although I lost the original piece, the music has been ingrained and I re-recorded it this week - here's Harlequin's Dream:

https://soundcloud.com/paulmmorgan/harlequins-dream

So if you read the note in the Harlequin manual you now know the fuller story:

"Jan Jones, Andrew Moss and Alan Tucker for their confidence
in bringing the original Harlequin Frame Buffer (a jumble of
wires connected to the parallel port of an Amiga 500) to Amiga
Centre Scotland." source: http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/Harlequin.pdf

Our little lot is spread 4 corners: I now live in Southern California, Jan owns a software company in Thailand, Alan is following his cycling passion in France and I lost track of Andrew.

Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoy.

[gulliver]

Thank you for this post, I really enjoyed it.

Also Harlequin´s Dream sounds very good!

By any chance, could you make the Harlequin´s schematics public domain?

I dare ask this, since we have a community that is always interested in recreating old hardware for the sake of enjoyment.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

Unfortunately once the prototype was handed over to ACS it went through quite a few changes - for one the prototype's resolution wasn't as high... I think the first one was only at PAL resolution. Being the youngsters we were, documentation wasn't our forte so i think most, if not all the docs were at ACS...