DL238 Quantel HAL Express Restoration Part 2

In Part 2 of the Quantel HAL Restoration i detail what was done to the HAL to get it into a working state, detail some of the built in diagnostics and give you a very quick tour of the system before we tackle the big problem... the Dylan disk array which i will be looking at in Part 3!

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[gordonm]

I know you would never design such a board from scratch and will have building blocks from a previous generation where you could consolidate things into higher density FPGAs away from discreet logic or lower density FPGA…but…

Total respect to old school Quantel R&D guys like Rob S and Neil H who I have met at Newbury in the past and all the other colleagues who would see a sea of programmable logic as a normal day in the office.

It was Rob who told me the story of needing to create a license key for a specific functionality on a Paintbox chip so used his home phone number as the enabling key and Neil designed one of the boards on the Mirage which Neil dropped into conversation when a colleague said he used to drive round Europe in a van with one rigged up in the back (from faded memory, refresh of DRAM a bit ropey now).

It is also interesting seeing ‘Quantel’ branded ASICs rather than FPGA which was quite common in the 90s across many broadcast manufacturers.

[DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I hope that you are able to get your system back up and running some time soon.

[Bassquake]

Bonkers amount of chippery! So many possible points of failures, some good engineering there.

[GregorPQ]

This is highly interesting, thank you for sharing!

[dylanpriest]

Can you show us the BBC and ITV quantel paintboxes because you're an awesome YouTuber. 👌

[hateWinVista]

82 FPGAs, that's the finest hardware p0rn right there.

[Spritetm]

Wow, those FPGAs are tiny! Only 208 LUTs (so 17K'ish LUTs in total for the 82 FPGAs on the board); and I imagine those Raytheon chips are external multipliers. Nowadays you could probaby replace all those FPGAs and multipliers with an USD10 ECP5 or so FPGA and have room to spare to put emulation for that Transputer in there as well.

[BeauTardy]

Whenever you get one of these Hals to work you might be able to read some of my old Archive Reels from the MO disks you xferred. :)

[frankowalker]

Awesome stuff. You've done a brilliant job with HAL. :)

[AppliedCryogenics]

Wow, that video board seems like an extreme example of throwing money at a problem. Such boards are often conformally coated, having come out of cutting-edge military tech with nation-state funding.

[heinrichhein]

Amazing as always, could watch hours of this kind of stuff, thanks!!! But i have one small thing, the intro audio fade is a bit fast and to abrupt, it cuts also to early for me if you can extend the L Cut that would be nice you can make a slower Audio Fade and the ending should not clash with your introduction. You can absolutely disagree with my opinion it is just a suggestion

[DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

If only Quantel had used 82 Transputer processors it might have been better but the chips mig be unobtainium.

[AmauryJacquot]

any chance of recreating a replacement PCB and transfer all the chips on it ?

[merseyviking]

Java?! Quantel came a long way from Pascal, didn't they?

[DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I wonder can you not use 100TiB Data Centre SSD drives for use with the QUANTAL HAL plus an associated Array Controller Card.