Just some small snippets of extra information about the CEL Electronics P164 & P152B video effects combo:
The P177 connector at the back is for the 'P177 Component Combiner'.
Also additional devices related to this are the 'P158 Eric Editing System Machine Interface' and 'P163 Digital Effects Controller'.
The P164 & P152 form a system called the 'CEL MS850B Effects System', other variants of this are the MS851B with the addition of a BIM (Built In Mixer) and the MS852B which is basically one P152 Touch Screen Controller and two P164 DVEs with the BIM option. The touch screen controller can operate multiple P164s at the same time.
After some lengthy reading about similar DVE systems from Quantel, Sony and Abekas during the mid-80s i believe this is run of the mill system. Maybe offering similar performance to these other high-end and seriously expensive systems but at lower cost. Given it's date (the user guide is written in 1990) it does seem somewhat lacking in capabilities. But this remains somewhat unknown until i can get the system running.
If anyone has any information about any of these devices, please let me know by leaving a message in the comments.
P152 & P164 EPROMs
I have also dumped all of the EPROMs from both the P152 and P164. Interestingly the P164 does have a number of ASCII text strings contained in the CPU Board EPROMs.
ROMCP0 & ROMCP1 are interleaved so the two 32kbyte EPROM dumps need to be merged to form a single 64kbyte binary.
The strings seem to relate to a DSP programming or debug interface as these code snippets show extracted from the CPU board EPROM.
H-help: M=modifyD=dumpF=fill PROGRAM
m=modifyd=dumpf=fill DATA
R=regdumpG=gotoK=code upload
B=set breakpointC=continue
I=int enableX=int disable
Z=disassemble
>>> TMS320C25 Diagnostic Kernel V9.0 <<<Serial Ports
NO 16k- 32k- RAM system
EPROM ID: Storage Processor DPRAM
** TEST OK **
EPROM boot block not found
AUTOBOOT DISABLED
Non-volatile RAM is corrupt
DISASSEMBLE
I have connected to all of the serial ports available, all those on the P152B do nothing as i expected. The 'Controller' port on the P164 makes my USB->RS232 adaptor drop its USB connection so may not be RS232 but the 'Panel' port outputs a continuous stream of '[00]' at 9600/8/N/1
