 Hey everybody, welcome back today. I am very excited to talk about something that I've always really wanted to get into. That, of course, is the 240p test suite. Now, I don't need to tell you, but this is the best, one of the best things that we have in our community for the CRT community. And it's all really thanks to MD4EA and Artimeo and some other people behind the scenes that have been working hard to develop open source software and things to help us calibrate our screens without actually having to track down very old and expensive and rare analog calibration machines. These are actually programmed with the RetroGamer in mind, so they're perfect for what we're going to be actually using the CRTs for, for the most part. So today I want to talk to you specifically about someone who has recently joined the MD4EA team and has contributed to a new test pattern for the 240p test suite. So today you're going to get an exclusive look at the new test pattern. At the new member who actually made this pattern is Keith Rainey and he's been working hard on it and asked if I would take a look at the pattern and kind of give him some feedback as well as, you know, try it out on a couple CRTs. So what I've got today is we're going to be looking at it first on the Super Nintendo on the NEC XM2960 Plus and we're going to look at it because I have not even begun the restoration on this. I thought it would be a great opportunity to look at it before we worked on it and hopefully we can make it look a lot better using that screen in later calibration episodes, but today we can take a quick overview of that. And then behind me on the smaller 14 inch PVM and it's a 14L2 I've got a Sega Genesis and we'll run through the version of the 240p test suite on there and look at the new pattern on it and then I'll go through a couple of other patterns that are in that version that are not in this version that you can use to get things like better convergence and white beam uniformity and things like that. All right, that's enough of the introductions. Let's jump around and look at first our Super Nintendo on the NEC XM29 Plus. Now here we are in front of the NEC XM29 and I'd like to tell you just a couple things about the setup we're using real quick before we get started in looking at the new pattern. We were going to be using the Super Nintendo. Now this is the SNS 101 version which is the later model and it also is an NTSC version. It has been modified with Voltar's RGB mod kit. We're using RGB out through SCART that's ultimately going to be in C into the monitor and it's going to be RGB and then sync and the setup we're using today is using C-sync through the cables and out the mod into the monitor. We are in 240p mode. The video resolution for the majority of Super Nintendo ROMs is going to be 256x224p. If we go to test patterns we can find our new pattern down here under monoscope and this is Keith Rainey's pattern and here it is. Now what I need to tell you about this pattern that makes it so great is that it's really got everything that you need in one screen to check four vital things all in one place. First off you could check your geometry. Secondly we could check our convergence and we could do both our dynamic and our static convergence and I'll show you even a closer demonstration of that here in a second. We're also going to talk about how this pattern can be used to determine your aspect ratio and make sure that you have a correct aspect ratio on your screen and then finally you can use this pattern to dial in your focus on your monitor. Now one of the features of this pattern is that Keith has built in a way to reduce brightness on here so if you tap your A button you will incrementally reduce that brightness all the way down to where it's not visible on the white lines and you just have the red screen and then nothing and if you press it again it'll go all the way back to where it is illuminated. Now that is very helpful because when you do things like adjust your convergence and your focus you need to have the brightness turned down as low as possible but where you can still see the lines that way I could check a lot of the things on this screen. So first off let's get some terms correct here. We're going to be looking at our static convergence which is our convergence through the center of the screen. We're going to be looking at our dynamic convergence which is the sides and then of course our corner convergence could be looped into the dynamic convergence. We'll look over those and then finally we can look again at our focus our aspect ratio and our geometry. So if we just look at our geometry real quick on the screen you probably could tell that we have an extreme loop down here or curve but it's something that should be addressed probably in the deflection block so that means we should try to make some geometry adjustments on this or check capacitors in the deflection block to make sure that they're they're all still within spec. Geometry is pretty easy to look at you can see your vertical and your horizontal geometry as well as your screen tilt and things like that but let's take a quick second to talk about how you would use this to adjust your aspect ratio. There are all types of geometrical well squares and then rectangles and then squares within squares and I don't want to get overly spending a lot of time on this but I do want to emphasize that these squares especially for example the red square that is always here this is supposed to be a perfect square and so is the square inside the square so if you measure this side and then this side and they're equal then you will have a correct aspect ratio so again for the super nintendo if you want the correct aspect ratio all you really need to do is make sure that the red square is perfectly square and then you can check both sides on an easy way to do this on a leaning screen would be to use like a piece of string a shoelace piece of yarn and then measure it and make sure that you've got again an even square and then if you took that further all these other squares should be perfect squares so every square should be a perfect square on the entire screen and that will ensure that you have a perfect aspect ratio on this entire screen so that's one of the amazing features of this pattern is it's going to help you to pretty much easily determine how far you are out on your aspect ratio and it's pretty easy to adjust that so if you need to for example if your height is shorter than your width all you have to do is expand your vertical size till they match and the same thing with the horizontal if it's too short or too big you could just expand it to where it matches and that way you'll have the right aspect ratio now doing that could cause you to lose some screen and some of these areas will go into an over scan but that's perfectly fine that's perfectly normal and that's how things were with analog video back in the day so what you want to do is just again try to determine where you want to give up on something do you want to have perfect aspect ratio and see everything and have a little bit of under scan well then you're going to see lines across the sides in the top in the bottom or you can perfectly aspect ratio it over scan a little bit and you might have a little bit of display going out of the screen range just a slight bit a couple lines but you'll have a perfect aspect ratio and a larger screen I prefer the latter with the larger screen and not seeing the lines on the tops and the bottoms so if we brought we tap a and we get our brightness down to about that level we can hone in then on our focus we need to have this as light as possible that way we could see the individual separation of lines here on a screen all over and then we can tweak our focus if you try to do it with everything brightened it's not possible you'll still end up with a little bit of blur that's why you have to turn it down and then you can adjust that so that's pretty simple you just have to turn this brightness down to about the level we're looking at here and then you just tweak your potentiometer that controls your focus which is either going to be on your fly back or the back of the neck board the last thing I want to talk about is your convergence again a little bit more clearly and we're going to look at real close at some corners here first off we'll be taking a look at our bottom left hand corner down here this is we're going to zoom in now and I'm going to show you just how this corner looks and then if we break it down and get closer with our camera we can see the individual colors start to separate on our convergence and again we're looking at the outside dynamic convergence specifically corner convergence and then you can see how this pattern gives us the ability to really hone in on a lot of different spots in this corner where we would before just be looking at a dot in this corner with the last patterns or a line we have a lot of different lines and shapes and almost like a target here that is really helpful and we can see how these beams are just not aligned in this corner and get really close you could see how separate the blue is from the green and the red and this is just a great test pattern it shows you that extra clearly and so we've gotten real close here and we could see that separation so that's one thing that we need to address in this corner and let's zoom back out here for a second and then we'll jump to our probably worst corner on this monitor and that would be the top left hand corner upper left again we've got the same shapes here same structure in our corner for cube on our pattern but we don't even need a convergence meter we can almost use the camera and a naked eye to see just how separated the red green and blue lines are again vertically which is just causing a blurry current corner that if you stare at it long enough it definitely will give you a headache but as we get closer you can absolutely see how on the shadow mask those light beams are just not lined up correctly and thus not giving us a white picture there that should be just all white it's we're looking at a rainbow effect in this corner and that's something again that's probably going to need to have a yoke adjustment as well as convergent strips placed inside there and then the final thing I'd like to look at on convergence if we back back out is our static convergence in the middle of the screen we're going to use the target and the blocks inside the red block the center red block to check this we'll zoom in here and take a close look at our convergence in the center of the screen and it is actually really good convergence in the center of the screen so the static convergence on this monitor looks really sharp and if we zoom in extremely close to our target in the middle here we'll see how those beam uh has it looks white but you can see how the red green and the blue actually line up in the same area of the shadow mask in are coming through on the same holes in the mask and then they're hitting the screen and lighting up the electrons properly so the static convergence is in a good shape here and that's primarily the the major four things you can adjust just from the screen alone now we'll go through the sega genesis version and this is a different setup obviously we've got a sony this is a pvm 14 l2 so we're not using the shadow mask anymore we've now got it on aperture grill trinitron tube we're also going to be using the sega genesis and this is a model two that has been rgb modded with the triple bypass kit and then it's actually being run through component into this monitor using the hd retrovision component cables and if you look at the test pattern up here on the screen you'll notice we have a new menu setup now this is because the genesis version has a lot more tools in it than the super family common super did teddo version so there are more patterns so to get to the new pattern we'll just need to click on test pattern on the main screen now most ntsc genesis and sega games are going to be at 320 by 224 for our resolution but if we go down here to our monoscope pattern we have an option of display modes for either the 320 or the 256 both these will appear the same size on the screen but it just depends if you want to have more of a sega genesis setup for the sega aspect ratio or more of a ntendo aspect ratio we'll do the sega aspect ratio on the screen so you can see that again it's the same pattern with the same rules if you press the a button it dims and the cubes go away now there is a slight difference to this pattern you'll notice we've got plus signs in the corners and cubes in the corners instead of the crosses and then there's actually crosses inside the cubes and then crosses over here that weren't there before if you want that pattern all you need to do is back out by hitting c go back to 256 and it will pull up the other pattern so you have both those patterns in here so you have the super did to do pattern and the genesis pattern in here so you could check you could check your screen based on both of them if you'd like to but that's a really cool tool so you're actually getting two patterns on the sega genesis version where you only get the one on the super did tendo and since we've gone through in depth and showed you all these things on the pattern on the nc monitor i will not show you the same things just accept to show you that this is available and it has even more options on this sega and mega drive version all right there you have it that's the first initial look at that new test pattern on those two systems and two different types of crt displays so look there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes with mb4a as far as like sound preservation and video preservation and great tools like this are being developed but this is all open source and just there are so many people behind the scenes contributing i want to say a huge thank you to the whole team over there at mb4a and especially you know keith for working on this pattern but also our teamio for everything he does and everybody else that's involved there's a lot of people and so if you want to know more information about them please check out the links i have in the description for this video just go check out i'll have a link to the web page specifically for the 240p test suite and then also a way that you can go and help out and support them because again we're getting all these amazing tools and we're not having to contribute really anything um and these guys work and gals they work from uh you know they don't they don't get any uh contribution i mean beyond what you contribute they're not going to be getting compensated as professionally as they would be if this was something that we tried to go and buy from the marketplace so if you wouldn't mind just go check out those links below and show them some appreciation definitely i will have a link to keith's twitter account you can go follow him and show him some love by you know let him know that you've enjoyed his test pattern once you get an opportunity to load it on whatever console that you decide to use it on it works great obviously and also i will be using this pattern to calibrate screeds further in the future including the n-e-c that you saw uh with all the issues in this episode and then i'll be having keith come back on here in the next coming months to talk about this pattern other things calibration challenges and more but anyway that's enough for this video it is way longer than i first intended it to be but that's okay please again check out the links in the description to the video and i will see you guys next time with some more retro content