Name: 1980s VP-380 Video Pointer: $920 TV Arrow Generator
Uploaded: 2020-03-06T17:26:54.000Z
Duration: 8 min
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Adverbs of manner

Greetings and welcome to a particularly pointy LGR thing!

That being the VP-380 Video Pointer, which sold for $920 on release in the early 1980s.

And I’ll get straight to the point, this box does one thing and one thing only: it

superimposes pointers on top of composite video.

Yep! An expensive device dedicated to plopping arrows onto your screen [chuckles]

And that’s exactly why I had to grab one when I ran across it in a medical surplus auction a while back.

Vintage electronics that serve such a singular function amuse me to no end for whatever reason,

and the fact that this thing was purpose-built to essentially just generate a cursor on a

TV and sold for almost a thousand bucks just cracks me up, man.

And despite its admirable simplicity, it seems they were continually manufactured and sold

by FOR-A Company Limited out of Tokyo, Japan through at least the late 1990s.

Well, being that I got this from a medical supplier should be one indication, but let’s

refer to FOR-A’s own marketing material.

The VP-380 was included in their display and measurement product category, among three

other devices that were quote, “beautifully simple and economical solutions to teleconferencing,

school or corporate training, medical briefings, or scientific analysis support.”

In other words, back before everyone just whipped out a computer or a tablet when they

needed to present some knowledge in video form, products like the Video Pointer and

its FOR-A siblings could perform the task instead.

So, say you’re a putting together a project about birds, and you need a way to point out

You’d use the Video Pointer to put an arrow above Bird A, or a box around Bird B. Or whatever,

doesn’t have to be birds. Could be like, kumquats or something, I dunno.

And going further, the pointer could also be connected to the other FOR-A video measurement

devices, like the Video Micro Scaler, the Video Measuring Gauge,

Combined, these four boxes provided a powerful set of tools to superimpose visual indicators

and measurements of distance and scale on top of your video projects, whatever they may be.

Of course, all this stuff combined would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars, so if

you ever used these back in the day chances are it was through a school, business, medical

facility, or some similar context outside of the mainstream market.

These weren’t made for home video use, is what I’m saying.

Not that anything was stopping you from spending a grand just to place arrows on top of your

VHS tapes and video games at home, but I can’t imagine that was done very often.

So let’s do it now, cuz I’m itching to draw arrows on things that don’t need arrows!

And to do that we’ll be using this delightful Sony PVM-1271Q, an early 80s professional

CRT befitting the Video Pointer, especially being a light gray medical variant.

Of course, you can hook up the Video Pointer to just about any kind of composite display,

but being that the I/O uses BNC connectors you’ll either have to convert them to RCA

using separate adapters or skip that and use a professional video monitor as intended.

You also get BNC connectors that accept 75 Ohm terminators on both the output and the

input, with the related impedance switch on the latter.

All commonplace stuff on broadcast and medical video equipment like this.

Now it’s time to power everything on, though at first all you get is a blank screen.

You won’t actually get a video signal of any kind until you provide an input signal

to the Video Pointer, and for this first test I’m gonna use a Sega Genesis

Notice his tapping foot and impatient expression.

[chuckles] Ahh, I don’t know I’m doing with this thing but it’s the best.

You just move around that little joystick on the front of the case and it moves around

No dead zone, no edge acceleration, just a 1:1 representation on-screen.

I dunno why I’m so amused by it, but whatever!

Controlling a mouse cursor-like thing on top of whatever video signal you want, in real

time with no computer or software or anything?

Yeah that’s just my kinda hardware, inside and out.

Now that I’m thinking about it, let’s hop inside for a minute and see what it’s packing.

And well, not a whole lot but it’s still fun to look at.

All the requisite NTSC display hardware and video generation stuff, with a small FOR-A

mainboard holding most of the circuitry in one place.

Got some fresh pots here for adjusting the horizontal and vertical positioning of the

And at the heart of it is a Mitsubishi M5L2764K, an 8-bit EPROM that’s been programmed with

all the video pointer goodness it needs, covered up by a sticker since there’s a little window

on top to erase the chip using ultraviolet light.

And on front you get those satisfying push button switches for the power, pointers, and

such, each activating with a nice sprung springiness.

And then there’s the joystick, with the shaft manipulating two potentiometers, sliding

around back and forth inside a neat little assembly.

Not quite what I expected but it works superbly well.

Anyway yeah, got distracted there, we’re still not done testing out the pointers.

After all it isn’t limited to producing only white arrows.

Under the ‘Matt’ label there’s a switch that allows you change the pointer color from

white to black, so that’s a thing in case the video background is clashing with the cursor.

You can also adjust the ‘Super’ switch to turn the pointer on or off, or make it

flash between the two for a steady strobing effect.

And over on the left there are four buttons to change between arrow directions, as well

This provides four more pointers to utilize: a large circle, a smaller circle, a plus sign

I mean, it still only does the one thing: placing pointers on-screen.

But at least you have alternative cursors that might make more sense for certain situations,

like surrounding an object of interest or maybe testing display geometry to make sure

circles appear nice and circular on various parts of the screen or whatever.

Or hey, why not add a crosshair to shooters lacking them?

Not that Doom needs a crosshair due to its generous auto-aiming system, but ya know.

I’m trying to come up with reasons to use this thing, cut me some slack.

Besides, adding your own crosshair isn’t unheard of even nowadays.

It’s still a hotly-contested topic for certain competitive FPS games, with purpose-built

software performing the same task of adding crosshairs to online shooters.

Even my main monitor has an overlay function built-in to add various crosshairs to your

I know this is not the intended usage of the VP-380 Video Pointer and it’s considered

Subtitles ListPlay Video

1980s VP-380 Video Pointer: $920 TV Arrow Generator

stuff

fascinating

manipulate

purpose