Vidi Amiga 12

Im pretty new to the forum (first post) and wasnt sure where to post this but here seemed a likely enough place! I brought an A600 off of EBay recently and among the various "extras" was what on closer inspection appeared to be a Vidi Amiga 12. I managed to find it on the Amiga Hardware database site (cant remember the exact name of the site) and even managed to download some software/drivers. Unfortunately I wont be able to test it properly for a while.

Anyway to my point... Has anyone used this piece of hardware? Any information would be appreciated to be honest I dont totally understand what its for.

Cheers.

[Cammy]

The Vidi Amiga 12 is a 12bit (4,096 colour) video digitiser/framegrabber. When plugged into the parallel port, you can plug a video source into it (such as a DVD player, video camera or games console) and using the VidiAmiga software you can take screen shots from the video. If you can pause the video source and skip frame by frame (like most DVD players can), then capture each of these frames (some times skipping every second frame to save memory) and combine them into an animation file which can be played back on any Amiga. Images can be saved in a few different formats including IFF/ILBM and JPEG.

Back in the days before cheap webcams and USB interfaces, these things made the Amigas way more fun than any other computers, along with Genlocks, sound samplers and other plug-in peripherals. You could capture people's faces and draw funny mustaches or devil horns on them, or stick their head on an animated body and make them walk around the screen. While they might not be too useful these days, they're still a fun piece of retro hardware that will give you something to play with and show your friends and kids would have heaps of fun with one of these if they had their own Amiga.

I have the later model, the Vidi Amiga 24 RT which is a Real-Time 24bit version of the one you have, and I love it!