Imaging The Past

I’m continuing to root through the hoard of Commodore 64 diskette images from the 80s I rediscovered the other day, and I found that the diskettes contained a large number of files called things like DDLARS3. That’s my name! So what could they be? Well, some Googling shows that the DD files are from Doodle Draw, which I have no recollection of what so ever. But looking at the images (after converting with recoil2png), I’m starting to recover some (possibly false) memories… I had a digitiser! Or was it called a “frame grabber”? It plugged into the C64 and digitised a one-bit image! In real time! It was like magic! But… er… how did it work? Was it a camera? No, that doesn’t sound likely. Did I borrow a video camera for the images below? Did it plug into the VCR? I’ve googled a bit now, and I can’t seem to find anything that jogs a memory — and they talk about the digitiser being slow? No, it was real time as far as I can recall? I mean, it showed a moving 1-bit 320×200 image in real…