 Hello everybody, welcome back to comments and questions. This is episode three. Today I've got some really great questions coming from the last few videos that I've produced and I'm gonna go through those and at the end of the comments and questions I've got a update for you where I will be going in I'll give you a little details on it first in this video but I will be at a local gaming expo coming up in November. So I have full details on that at the end of this. But let's just go ahead now and we'll get started with questions. And question number one comes from Kenny Lauderdale and Kenny on YouTube asked on the last convergence tool video. I'll put the link to that up top in the eye above. He asks, how do you look at the lens when you have to look at the back of the CRT to adjust the he's his pots but it's actually you're gonna adjust the rings I'll show you in a second. He said he probably said in the video but is there any chance of touching something live or hot basically while you're making this adjustment? And the truth is yes. But let's first go through the adjustment. So this is what you're adjusting these rings and this could be the same for any type of CRT that is a picture display CRT like a television or monitor. This is a Sony PVM the back of right here on the CRT gun. And these first two sets of rings control the green convergence, vertical convergence I believe and then the blue and red rings here that are the second set of rings controls the blue and red. Again, those colors are controlled on these two rings. And the way you adjust these is you adjust each set so the green set you're gonna either widen the distance between the two prongs on those rings and then you'll also rotate those rings up and down the side of this yoke. And then you'll just go back a fourth and do that and then check the screen to see what's happening. You're gonna make a little adjustment and then you look at through the tool, the lens eye and with your pattern pulled up, try to see whether it has improved your situation or whether it's gotten worse. So you have to just kind of go back and forth between adjusting the rings back here. You wanna adjust the rings and then go check out what's going on on the screen. Now I did say there is a possibility of getting a little bit of a zap here. So everybody pay attention if you're gonna try this type of an adjustment. You see these metal heat sinks on the back of this neck board, okay? There's three of them, usually sometimes four. Most of the time there's three. And if you're over here and you're adjusting these rings and you're looking at the front of your screen at the same time and you happen to ground your hand against this metal, which is very easy to do because I've done it a lot, you get a little zap. Now it's not a very big like electrical zap. It's gonna be more like, you know, getting a little voltage and it just goes through your hand so it doesn't go through your body. But it does shock you so it scares you and then it really messes with your confidence going forward of making any adjustments back here. So I want you to avoid just any type of little zap. So be aware that when you make an adjustment in the back these can give you a little zap so you can wear some gloves. And they don't have to be the big electrical gloves because this is just not, like I said, it's not a high voltage amount of current that's going through your hand. And it's just going between the small points. So it's just a little zap, not even as bad. Well, you know, if you ever had a kid on a farm or when I was growing up, I used to grab the old cow fence and it would zap you. And that's kind of what it would feel like, not even that strong though. It's not a hugely strong zap. But again, it just messes with your confidence. So the best thing to do is to go and make a tiny adjustment on the rings and then go and check out the screen after that. And don't try to really do them while you're doing it. It's not as easy, you know, to do it that way but it's going to be much safer to go see what's going on with the screen and then go back, make an adjustment and then go back to the screen again, check and see if your adjustments making a big improvement or if it's not, but that's going to be the safest way. And you'll pretty much avoid getting zapped, especially if you have a really good condition, PVM like these or other, you know, high-end CRTs because there's a lot of wiring back here, but most of it, for example, this yoke, the other stuff is covered up well. These points are covered up by plastic on the top of the yoke. And then there is a film over these copper lines that that will not zap you if you touch it at all while it's running. So again, this convergence thing is going to be something that you're going to have to do while it's running. A lot of times you'll come in here and there's not been maybe a convergence adjustment. So just make sure you actually need one. And if you do come back in here and you might even have to take an X-ACTA knife and cut through some of that silicone there or whatever epoxy they may have used to bind those rings together, but it could be done and it is worth it. And then this is another comment on the same video from Zero himself, Steve, he killed me here. I was trying to get one of these tools, which is again, the convergence tool you saw me use in that little demo. And now it's impossible. Which model did you have? I noticed there are several different models for this tool. So yes, there were on my model, the model number is rubbed off completely because the tool is so old. It just says client convergence, CRT checker tool or something like that. And it doesn't have the actual model number visible on it anymore. The manual is a universal manual for about 12 different lenses. So, or maybe even more, you saw on the paperwork I showed briefly in the last video, where it lists a bunch of different models. So just note that as long as it says CRT, convergence, checking tool, and it looks like that lens, it could be a little bit different than that, but if it looks like that lens, and it works, it's just a lens. So there's gonna be a lot of different brands. It's not really important on which one you get. And there's also possibly an alternative. I've been doing some research and we're looking at a thing called a jeweler's loop. And this loop is just a lens. They made some really high quality ones I saw. This was pictured for $15 shipped from like Home Depot. But if you get on Amazon, you can find these for as cheap as $6 shipped. So if you wanna just take a risk and purchase one of these to see if it's right for you, maybe you can get away with it if you just have one CRT using this jeweler's loop or maybe this jeweler's loop is good enough for everybody for the most part. I enjoy the tool I got, but it was a lot more expensive than this. It was almost $70, $80 shipped. So they might even be more than that now. So there's not very many of those left, but these jeweler's loops are still made. So anyway, check that out, Google that, look at that wherever you buy stuff online. Look for the jeweler's loop and maybe I'll get one and run a test here and a video for it. Okay, so the next three questions actually came from Antoine on Patreon. And I know I've got part of his question blocked out here, but I'll read it to you. He had several questions, pretty much pertaining to geometry. First, grid fully visible or not? And I'll kind of explain what he means here. When you configure a monitor with 240p, should the grid be fully visible? Should I stop at the red dots? It says, because there's a difference if he makes a fully visible on the dot pattern, when you're using different consoles and configurations. So let's just take a look here at one of the last monitors I worked on in the 2030. And what he's predominantly talking about here is the space between the pen cushion, on this pen cushion and grid screen in the 240p test suite. He's talking about how much do you adjust the geometry and where do you get your, or what's the best spot to land your over scan? Because the red area is considered to be kind of the over scan area on your picture. Now, sometimes if you pushed it all the way to the white and just had the whole red and over scan, you're gonna push too much of your picture out and you'll lose a lot of your picture. So that's not really the best option. It's also not a good option to leave it where it's got the red lines really visible at all. Because if you leave them at visible at all, either horizontally or vertically. Now, please just ignore the pen cushion problem on this where it's bowing. I'm just talking about only and the yoke tilt. That's all part of a different repair. But the zone that you wanna land for is right in between this dot and then the red line. And I mean, you could go to where you have just a barely small sliver of dark in between that white area or the dark like one or two lines and then your red dots. That's really gonna be your best overall setting because unfortunately a lot of the 240p consoles and things like that are still gonna land differently on your screen. So you're gonna end up with a different look when you switch over the consoles. You might have something shifted a little bit left or right. That's pretty common. So you just have to find a happy medium where it pretty much overscans a little bit on everything. And that way you don't really have to worry about the lines showing up where you get a dark spot or maybe a blue background line or something because that's part of the programming on those video games. So here's a close-up of this screen and right here is like a dark sliver of space, not very much, but that's what I usually go for is have it almost pushed all the way out to where that dot is. Again, like I have it here on this larger screen pushed all the way out like that. That's really the best overall setting that you're gonna go for when you're trying to set up geometry and you're worried about vertical and horizontal sizing. And this next question is about PAL and NTSC. And again, we're talking about straight up geometry question here. When I configure all my PAL screens, I have a good grid. But when I switch to NTSC, I have a convergent issue and I have to change pin amp and pin phase. Maybe it's a behavioral normal or maybe it's a capacitor issue. And this is something I am not entirely sure about because I unfortunately in North America, I don't have anything that is PAL, nothing. And I never come across it. So I'm looking here at the service manual. This is a standard service manual for example, a Sony PVM 20M2 or 14M4. This is pretty much the same thing that you'll find in the service menu. The number one to the number 17 items are for the most part geometry settings. But the first three settings are listed as for 50 deflection. So that 50 is gonna be your PAL and then the 60 is your NTSC. So that's separate where you've got one, two, three for PAL and four, five, six for NTSC. However, if you keep going down, you've got deflection again, this time no designation and everything else is designation free. So once you get past this first six, there's no designation for the next 10 or 11 settings down here, they're all gonna be NOR deflection. So I feel like that here we're gonna have horizontal frequency, video phase and video size or vertical size. Those horizontal frequency and video phase can as like side to side sweeping or centering and vertical size is the vertical size. Those are obviously separate and on their own in these manuals and in the monitor. But I feel like the possibility is that the rest of them share these deflection settings. So that's gonna be a hard one to figure out. I'm not really sure, but from my best guess on looking at this manual, I would think that since they share the same settings that you will probably have to make a change on each one of the settings when you switch between 50 and 60 on these shared settings. Because if there's something different when you plug it in and it doesn't look the same as it did when it had a PAL signal, then yeah, you'll have to go in and change these shared settings. Unfortunately, it doesn't separate all of them out for both PAL and NTSC. But those are just some great questions and we've got one more. Again, still talking about geometry. At the 240p test suite grids, okay, this is just the grid again we were talking about a couple of questions ago. And 240p, there are two grids with size differences. And if you've ever used the 240p test suite, you know there's a listing of most of them where it says two different sizes. And he was just asking which one's the best. And I went to the website and tried to see if they had anything listed on here, but they pretty much just have one grid listed on there and said it was used to again, measure your over scan for the most part. Now I also use it to see how my geometry is, but it's also used to judge linearity. And it's a good test for convergence if you just wanna see your convergence overall. So there's not really any notes about that. I feel like there's just two there so you can get a good feel for two different sizes and see which one works best for you on your screen, between the screen and the console that you're using to calibrate the screen with. And so that's it for the questions. Thank you very much everybody who said a question. I do wanna go through now the big expo announcement real quick and that is again, the Grand Ole Game Room Expo. And I'll put a link to this down below, but this is a three day weekend on November 8th through 10th in Nashville. And it is, this is either the third or fourth year it's been done overall. It's a very cool gaming and arcade retro gaming. I mean, pinball, crazy amounts of pinball. I've never seen more pinball in my life than at this show really. So this is the, I think the fourth year and this is my second year of being there. So I was there last year, I had a booth set up and I was there all three days. And so I will be there again this year. And if you are going to be in Nashville and you're gonna already be at this expo, please come by and say, hey to me, I'll have a booth. You'll see the retro attack labels and flags and I'll have some PVMs or BVMs there. And come by and say, hey, we'll just warn you that on the Saturday, the day of the actual event, Saturdays are the craziest. So they go from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. So if you wanna come speak to me, the best times are gonna be obviously Friday, Sunday, or both gonna be pretty open. So if you wanna come by and chat, I'll have plenty of time to talk. And then if you have to come by Saturday, you might wanna do it like after probably 7 p.m. That's when things kinda get slower on the booths and people just kinda disperse and go into mostly playing games after that point. There's a lot of cool tournaments. You can win prizes. If you go to this website that I'll send the link to, there is special accommodations at this hotel where you can get a nice package for pricing. I will tell you this hotel, it's not bad. Now it's not the nicest hotel. It's kind of a little bit older, but it will have pretty much a lot of things you need right within a decent distance. Like there are some fast food restaurants right around this hotel. And then you are literally a mile or two away from some really good local restaurants. And again, it is in Nashville, so you're probably within five minutes. Nashville's not as big as some of the other large cities. So you're five minutes of an Uber ride right into the middle of downtown from this hotel. And again, I will be there, so make sure you come by and say, hey, if you're gonna be there. I will be announcing some more information on this because I wanna make sure that if anybody wants to come by and say, hey, that they get an opportunity to. But that's gonna be it for today's episode. Thanks again, everybody, and leave me some more comments on the upcoming restorations. I've got quite a few more coming. Still got, oh goodness, three or four monitors that I've been working on over the past two weeks. And then I'm still really getting things ready for this BVM project because it's gonna be, again, the first BVM project, but I'm still waiting to acquire one more big part on it, and then we should be able to get that series all started and getting going and it'd be a really great experience. So thanks again. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.