 hello hello everybody welcome in today welcome in to episode one that's right we're at episode one I considered the announcement episode to be episode zero so last stream I did when it was last week and yes coal is right here taking a nap right now I will let you know that the coal cam is definitely grainy because it's my overhead desk cam that's been just pointed towards him so you could at least see him he's definitely here hanging out but I do have a brand new show for you and I'm thanking everybody for coming in thank you for showing up live today thank you mega cards thank you James Boone thank you Belmont Thorsea thank you Brian Harmon some regulars here to start off show one so that is great please feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the chat and I will be monitoring that as we go through today's show but I actually have an agenda that's right an attempted agenda here and my first agenda is not to turn everybody off with too much background jazz music because just a little bit is fine but sometimes I forget to turn that down and it gets a bit overpowering so yeah let's just let the chat get going here let the stream get rolling and if you do not mind please do help me out today by dropping a like on the stream and if you're on Twitter you could retweet my tweet about the show that would be helpful so we get a couple more people in here hello Edward how are you today great to see you hello why you all right great so I think everything's getting good everything looks good good to see you again Belmont I'm glad you got rained out today we were talking about rain last time and yeah I actually got a lot of rain here over the last few days that's been nice can't really complain about that it's been so dry here hey all wheezy so we'll come in to episode one of the CRT bunker I'm not the greatest at branding and so that may change at some point because I'll be honest I don't know how to lure people in by just titling a show that's an episodic you know like just live show where we're going to do multiple different things I do think there's going to be some segments that are going to reappear including something I've got planned again for today and so as the show goes it could change could change names but for now it's called the bunker this is episode one and I wanted to start off today by chatting a little bit about Atari there's actually been quite a bit of Atari news lately and you know sometimes I wonder does anybody even really care and I'm not trying to be mean I'm actually a big opponent and fan of the Atari the Atari 2600 so I'd like to just refresh you guys on a couple things here we'll talk about the things that I'm referring to as far as Atari news and so to do that let's just switch over here to our dashboard view and I'm going to refer to some things here first I'm going to refer to retro RGB and a post by Alex Mitchell from back on August 23rd and this was around the time within a couple days that Atari announces this new 2600 plus and it is an emulation based console and I'm not going to go into Alex's breakdown here completely but he has a lot of information that he was able to find out and that they got you know listed in this article that you're welcome to go back and fully read the the stuff that may be a little bit important so you know it's it's supposed to be a modern take on the VCS case of point it is a software emulation box but there are a few interesting features it's styled after the four switch Atari 2600 which that's the classic style it's compatible with physical cartridges from both the 2600 and the 7800 so that's a bit different and it includes a 10 in 1 game cartridge and that is what's pictured there with the dip switch to pick the games it's uses original controllers as compatible with the original controllers has HDMI output with a video widescreen mode and I don't think there's any announcements on the actual capabilities of this system as far as what the actual output is normally you see stuff like this and it just sounds like what like some kind of just blah not exciting thing right the compatibility for a controller and the compatibility for the 7800 cartridges are most likely the the biggest draws on this machine but that's not the only Atari news so there's this console that's been announced in late August and then it wasn't but a couple a couple of weeks later there was some more Atari news so you get the them announcing that they're doing that and then Atari age so I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Atari age but this is pretty much the community that was built 20 plus years ago and it has been gender it's basically started by this gentleman Albert who started this site and pretty much has fostered the entire Atari community behind the scenes for like home bruise and development all kinds of stuff I mean I can't even begin to grasp how much stuff there is an Atari age they do all kinds of things they even have places where you can buy from from support developers who make games and so the the intro but the interesting news about this was that last Thursday just last Thursday Albert here came and made a huge announcement that Atari age this community forum web page is being bought is being bought by Atari so they're not it's a situation again where we see a big company coming in and starting to acquire things they're now acquiring the Atari age forum which for a long time has been a great repository for information for people doing things even in things like modification I again I can't cover the depth of Atari age and just like a little news segment here I'll be here all morning talk talking about it so right and I think that some people are starting to start to wonder like is this the same kind of thing where a company comes in grabs IP and shuts down these shut down these servers or are they actually going to let the community continue on now what Albert does say in his post here is that he is moving into a new position where he's basically running on as the head lead of Atari age and he's got goals and again if you want to read more about this you can go to the forums on Atari age and look for the posts that stated Thursday 1024 from our Albert himself and that's that's funny that is about 20 minutes ago that would be Thursday the 7th of September so that's just some more interesting news I will give you just we'll take a look at some options here now I know this is kind of a little jumping around but it got me thinking about well first off this new console is this thing really anything that's special if you want to play Atari games right now your your options are unbelievably endless especially for emulation right you could have already had one of the other flashback consoles there's even people who make modifications to those flashback consoles and edge lets you play original carts on them so there's not it's confusing to me why they keep thinking there's a like hardware need for the Atari console because there are so many options there were so many Atari's made you can go back the path of having an original console or you can do one of the many other options to emulate this machine or play it through even like the mister or other emulation I mean there's not these games are so simple to play it's not as if you need a lot of hardware I mean the raspberry pies can easily emulate very well an Atari 2600 and 70 7800 library so this to me got me thinking like is this product just doomed from the get-go but let's look at a little bit deeper into this in so they announced this console they announced this and then again I started to think well you know the best option right now that people actually wanted was this because right now it's difficult to get like RGB from your original console and the best option right now is the 7800 game drive which came out recently this is a Stone Age gamer it's not not in stock but this allows you to go AV out of this port right here and you could play RGB out of that port okay so you don't have to even you mod your original hardware you can use this get RGB video and that's the really the best option of course this is $150 and highly sought after and it goes in anything with a card slot now will this work with the new Atari no one knows right it'll be hard to say that it would but there's a little bit more news so if you if you did have this cartridge or if you didn't have this cartridge you used to be able to modify your Atari and that was with this RGB kit here it's a pretty pretty lengthy install it's one of the first big kits for RGB I did way back in the day this is Tim Worthington shop online but recently I was pointed out that this is out of stock and no longer economically viable to manufacture so you can't buy the modifications any longer for this kit to make your original Atari 2600 RGB video the kits are no longer available so you can't actually get RGB from these kits will these kits ever come back I have no idea it's all just a lot of stuff a lot of thing going on in Atari world which I find is interesting but at the same time my question to you is did any of you care does any of this news about Atari make you worry some I think probably the biggest thing that sucks to me is the fact that this RGB kit is gone and it may never come back I do not know if there's a new board available for it but that's a little disappointing because I actually did a couple of these installs back in the day they were fun they're great learning experience working on the Atari 2600 is one of the best consoles to go in and actually I would show you this is the one was like the very first console that I modified that and I can say nope nobody really cares that's right but this has the Tim Worthington kit installed in it works great and actually can plug this in to my Sony 9L monitor here and this is an item I know I was talking to you this is an item I got from Atari age look it says it right there this is the other cartridge sorry it's not coming into focus very well there it is this is the other cartridge this is the current easy to get everdrive cartridge it's called the Harmony Cart and it works just fine you put it in there and turn it on pops up so I don't know if that'll actually let me yeah okay then this is an old cartridge this is from like 2011 is when this originally made but there's all this stuff there's already been a billion ways to play the Atari right like a billion ways so how how much does anybody really care about any of this stuff well what's what's to get excited about it actually sucks a lot of stuff is going out I'm worried about the forum probably going away and if not maybe that'll be a good thing maybe they maybe Atari wants to put out some developers products like for example this is another one that was I got at a convention and it's from champ games and he's an old coder from back in the day who used to write games and submit them to Atari and they make games now like this reproductions like this that you can buy I bought this at a convention I think it was like 40 or 50 bucks that's I mean it's a nice quality reproduction or new thing to me but so there's definitely a community there that's kind of been holstered behind the scenes but again it's this idea that Atari still holds some great value in the in the gaming scene I just don't feel like I don't feel like there's a lot of new people grasping to gunplay these old games I'm not trying to be disrespectful but you know there's so many different ways to play it I'm just trying to pick a game to put on in the background let's just let that whatever that is you can actually see it's running but we'll see time will tell will there be another RGB kit I don't know because again does anybody even care to redesign this and spend a lot of time I feel like the people that really want something their best bet if you want to go original hardware find a decent working console and just try to get one of these 7800 ever drives if you're doing that or again Mr. Kade or Mr. is it sorry not Mr. Kade just the regular Mr. is a great option for this and finally you could just go back and use RF and enjoy it and who cares right I think that's the big sentiment you know is it gonna be bad so anyway that's really all I had for first 15 minutes there spiel on Atari I just thought all that news was interesting and just some notes that you might see some more things in the news from Atari I don't know that this is a big deal or not this little console is it something that's just like a hundred bucks that they're gonna throw in and like the holiday season in Walmart it's gonna sit on the shelves and just turn into nothing we've all seen that happen before or do they actually care about the IP and try to make something better I don't know I feel like they tried to do that before with that other little console that they made that they made a big deal about that had like a rising computer in it and that was pretty much a flop so I don't really know what to think about it from them all right so subject one is done anybody have anything else to add on the Atari news front please do so in the chat I've been enjoying looking into it a little bit today and I thought that it would make a great segment here for the first episode of the CRT bunker so segment one over with we're on good timeframe here thank you again everybody this Monday morning our next segment is well let's see if I can remember which one I need to push here leave it's this button there we go oh and I remembered who watches the watchmen a segment that I actually ran a complete stream using that thumbnail and I thought it was so good I wanted to reuse it again and probably will reuse it to just introduce this segment anytime it comes up in the show and the point of this segment is if we're the only ones restoring and checking out this old hardware who watches us who makes sure we're so-and-so say you know doing the right thing and not going down the wrong path so it's kind of like a checks and balance kind of idea and this basically comes from hard experience a lot of times and that's what today's who watches the watchmen is all about now many of you follow me on Twitter will know that I've been working on a I've been working on a Sony BVM D 20 f1 you and it's been just a lot of work lots of caps I didn't really want to do a whole show where I was going through and you know showing everything I'd done on that but if you want to go check my Twitter feed you can find at USA retro you can find just threads of each individual board and the reason I wanted to bring up this particular one was really this just this photo refers to the biggest portion of this whole thing okay this BVM I was servicing had 47,000 hours on it and once you get that level of hours in it it needs to have everything checked out pretty much where you'll start to have issues the cool thing is about this one I discovered it can it can work with a lot of bad parts in it funny enough this D 20 is the this D 20 is a workhorse compared to the other D series like the D 9 the D 14 and the D the bigger D is they all have their little quirks but this one has less of all those quirks the D 20 and it can seem to work if there are some problems again in the boards we have a lot of bad caps it still manages to function but after 47,000 hours it was time to get in there and service every single board and some boards needed completely recapping other boards had already been partially recapped so they only needed to have partial recapping other ones had caps that were not near aged so they were left alone and then just serviced and chat tested all kinds of things but that really brings me to what's important here on this discussion that's this board if you ever look at the back of a Sony BVM you'll notice a lot of boards let's see if I can find some more boards on there I'm not sure well regardless this is the backside this is the card that is in the far left and it looks like it has or VGA inputs on it but those aren't video inputs those are just to communicate you can hook up the same VGA cables but you hook them up to different devices that you can use to communicate with your monitor and you can use this monitor to you can tell it commands from an outside source or vice versa you sometimes can command outside sources from this so these are not video sources this is for remote Seattle says remote to remote one but this card has a lot of the information and all the data from the monitor stored on it like the firmware and even the important thing today is the hours counter okay and so it doesn't matter about this battery because the battery what well the battery doesn't you know changing the battery won't affect it what what happens is I serviced this board and it needed a about 70 80 percent recap so I had to remove all those caps and you can tell that's what this picture is it showed there's there's an empty pad here hipty pad here and even through whole caps all those were removed those were a couple bipolar caps that were fine but after I got done running through that board and recapping it there it's done see it's all finished everything's good and ready to go once I install the car check it out it resets the hours so that's what I needed to tell everybody when there's probably another way to short out a certain capacitor on that board but when you service this board which had to be done the caps needed to be changed it resets the hours counter if you check out the operation time zero zero zero zero zero okay but there's a tell so this this could be problematic if you were just able to reset a BVM's hours so if you reset somebody's hours and then try to sell this monitor you know you could you know that's that's that's a sketchy thing thankfully when this happens Belmont yeah you're right ahead of me the serial counter serial number right here see how it's reset to zero so there never was a zero and I do not know have not been able to find if there's a method to go in here and reset this there may be I don't believe it would be easy it's not like you could just plug in the from what I can tell I haven't able to find anything in the menu that you can just go in there and tell it to put a different number in there so it does start tracking hours again because after some testing it went to one and then that but the if you ever see a very low operation time on the monitor the first thing you need to do is check out the serial number and make sure that it still has a serial number on it and in that serial number most likely will match the serial number on the shell of the BVM as well as inside the BVM there should be a tag in there with that serial number but that's not going to be zero so if it says zero it means it's been reset now thankfully with this client I did have a photograph of the hours on there and let me see if while I'm sitting here with you I can't pull up the drive folder and I can show you a couple of photographs of this monitor because I was absolutely blown away the way this actually looked this CRT looked amazing for something that was just had almost 48,000 hours on it I'm gonna pull up some pictures here of the finished this is the picture I need to show you this is the most important one and that's this one I look how great this this was in the dark well mostly dark right about dawn look how great that tube just looks on its own like nothing I mean that is super balanced and bright and that's on very low brightness while it's got 48,000 hours on it almost so someone shows you if someone showed this to me and again I went through and resurfaced this CRT completely so it looks I mean it looks very sharp like it looks cleaned up really cleaned up I cleaned up everything inside of it so if you looked at this and you you didn't know the actual hours and you could think something like this didn't have a lot of hours on it and kind of be tricked if you didn't know that hours counter trick because even I mean look at this this tube does not show right it doesn't show like it looks great it looks like every other BVM D20 it's not it's not blurry at all the colors are really good and that's yeah that's the finished one so I wanted to tell everybody about that specifically because that's that's kind of a big deal you know that I know so you could if I let this go out of my shop and I was like here you go and when let's not let's not pretend like there haven't been shady characters in the in the CRT reselling business over the years there've been plenty of them if they if they figured out how to do this they would have probably reset the hours on every single every single one of their monitors they sold and if you have somebody like who's really good at restoring them and they restore them for you it's just too much like you could really get somebody screwed up thinking that they got something that they really didn't get so anyway note that next time you look at a monitor and its service time all right guys and gals let's see we got just some things on yeah Jay Lynch you're welcome and Ariel welcome in all right so that is gonna do it for today's oh come on I know I can do it I know I can remember right who watches the watchmen maybe I can get some like better sound effects things like that and then you know really have a high quality show here but again when it's just yourself and a hug that helps you produce the show by pretty much just snoring the entire time in your in your ear over here then you have to do what you can do all right guys I'm gonna clean up my desktop here I don't think there's anything else on that oh I did forget one thing actually let me reopen that because there is one more there we go just don't want it to start playing okay finally today I'm gonna pull over a presentation I did last when was it last October last October okay I was at a presentation and this is not one that I this is why I do every year that I can make it to it and I have made it every year back to it now let me show you what I'm talking about here it's the music city multicon and if I go down here and show you this is their web page if you can make it to this it's October 27th to the 29th it's a lot of fun look at the amazing stars that will be here with me so I've got Danny Trejo the million-dollar man Jimmy Hart look at all these old-school wrestlers I love it IRS and this is really a mix of all kinds of things you got voice actors comic book people our friends the Pacina brothers and Tim Tim will be back I love it hopefully I'll get to see Tim again and then we've got my life in gaming and Mark Bessler from crap cut classic game room and then your boy Steve over here still all this still all the agenda all the way at the bottom so what I'd like to do is just go through my presentation from last year yeah okay I didn't think anybody probably had seen this because the numbers weren't very big on this like 400 views but what I wanted to really do was kind of go through my presentation a little bit last year we might skip through some of it because it is an hour long I wonder if I can do like a playback speed of 1.25 and maybe not and maybe I won't sound too awkward we'll see if I sound really awkward we'll adjust that back but what I'd love to do is kind of go through and critique this presentation with you guys and this one is just to give you a little bit more information you can always go just Google Music City Multicon but this one is in it's outside of Nashville it's Nashville Tennessee yeah some of you people have watched it that's funny okay well we won't try to skip through it too bad I haven't watched in a while I do actually need to see what I did because I kind of winged this one the other ones before this were more ones I tried to put together PowerPoints for and when you're doing like a 45 minutes Brian if you want to go back and check like the first 20 minute segment of today's show was on the Atari news we kind of skip your go back a segment we've but but anyway we'll go through this presentation I need to make sure I'm going to start playing it and then I'm gonna have to make some adjustments to the volume so give me a second as we go and work this out it's one o'clock and we can go ahead and get started because there might be a chance we run a little bit out of time here this is a brand-new presentation first off thank you everybody for coming today and well it does sound a little bit psychotic when I run it in that fast speed so I might have to go back to normal speed because my energy level is always so high at these things and then I need to make it so I don't hear it is loud as you guys hear it on your screen but that's over on there we turn that down a bit my name is Steve I've met a lot of you today and some of you haven't so if you'd like to say hello to me after the presentation I do have a booth right by the main entrance you just have to hang a right and you can sorry yeah I've got a couple other sorry about Atari stock things there and anyway I just wanted to let you know this class is again brand new it's about how a CRT works and so you know bear with me we might work through some things and this is a monitor here that is from 1993 and it is very complex so we're gonna walk kind of through this thing talk about how a CRT actually works what's actually happening and as you can tell this technology that is right here looks so much different than the flat screens of today there's so much more going on here and the reason really has to do with the video format itself so I'm glad again to do this I want to say a quick thank you to everybody who has helped put this show together and let me come and organize this like Dave and his team here at the convention and thanks again for everybody to be here and just real quick a little bit about retro tech in my business we do primarily restore and repair CRT televisions and monitors and the mission statement for my business is resurrecting vintage technologies for the modern world and that's pretty much the goal okay I will I will say that I've actually stuck with that you know I ran businesses before and it was kind of I always thought it was a little bit cheesy to have mission statements and things like that but I knew that if I could come up with a decent mission statement that I could stick with as kind of like the guiding point to the business and it actually make a little sense that is the mission statement it always has been it's even only my first business card I ever got made out but anyway we'll get through this introduction and see what I actually do it's been about six years last two years I've been doing this full-time and the really crazy thing is is there's really nobody else trying to do this anymore a lot of the people that I talked to who I confide in and try to get any kind of knowledge from on these machines are most of them are in their 90s and they are infinitely knowledgeable on these pieces of machine because they spent their whole lives working on them but unfortunately when they go a lot of the knowledge that was with them will be passed and will be gone forever and so I'm trying to help by preserving that and preserving this machine for the next generation and to make sure that people will be able to learn from this and and use this because it still does have a good amount of use in our modern world today so that's just a little bit about that now what is a CRT well there's gonna be some acronyms and things that we're gonna go through today so in case you've never heard of that CRT stands for cathode ray tube and that's pretty much referring to this device right here which is you know the major part in this whole tube television or monitor setup that is the tube itself this is an eight-inch tube so it came out of an eight-inch monitor but it's just a scaled-down version of the one in our demo unit today and you can just see how big and different it looks like a light bulb but what it really is it's a vacuum sealed glass tube and then it's got an emissions part up here and also a cathode and a anode cap and then right here so basically the way this gets an image onto the screen is the information is sent in the back here that you're gonna display through your pictures sent through a board like this and here it goes through this device inside the glass which is called an electron gun I'm muted again so but anyway I just wanted to say this guy did a great job of editing the the video here because this was something we had never tried before we did it all once and we you know we did it one time we were like alright let's just go for it the recording turned out pretty good and he was able to edit it back and forth we'll get to see don't worry I see you guys thank you all right let's get back in here but and then your image is blasted in beams on the front of the screen so it's a completely different technology than our normal our normal technology and that's why there's a lot of weird almost tricks and magic going on when it comes to a CRT because if we could slow it down we would see that all that's happening is these lines are being individually drawn on this tube face of the mask and all it does is it does it at such a high speed our eyes can't see it so we don't see the flashing or the blinking we just see it as a smooth constant image now that's kind of a little bit on the tube itself and it we're going to use some other tricks here to do things so that's a that's a pretty you know curved tube there that's a Sony style tube which they only curved on one side if you go out to the showroom floor you'll see many that are curved on all sides and flat sides and that is just to help you know early on these tubes had to be more and more curved because when you're shooting an image through there how do you get it to spread out evenly and show up evenly on that on that screen and the way that that was done was through this device here which is called a deflection yoke and so what this does is this directs your beams and it tells them where to land on the front of your screen and so that's the way that what happens here is the image is projected onto the screen and the deflection yoke tells it where to land on your screen and then you see it on your screen and that uses magnets and magnetism that's how that's drawn out those electrons are shot onto the screen and magnetism is used to pull them out and give you an image and so that's a little bit on just how that's getting to the screen and we're going to fire up this monitor here in a second but just before we even do that I would like to make a mention on safety because these machines do have the potential to really hurt somebody if you do not know what you're doing on them and that's probably one of the biggest keys that if you can remember anything just remember that you probably shouldn't just go and open your CRT at home and just like try to do what I'm doing today unless you're really ready and really study up on what is really dangerous because this point right here which goes in to our tube and this hole right here now this is not a hole that goes down to the tube it's literally just a little diameter like almost coin metal piece where electron or electricity can go but that can get up to 31,000 volts that goes into it while it's turned on so you would never for example want to have your hand really on that area right there when it's running now that is like the most important thing is that anode cap now the good thing is when it's turned off like this it really it doesn't it's not as harmless it's pretty harmless except again for that anode cap area which I know you see me touching it but again these monitors are not you know I they're not going to shock me but if you if you don't know you could get shocked so there's always that I need to make sure everybody knows that but we're going to go and just talk a little bit more about some of these parts so where that that really high voltage comes from is right here this device here and this is called your flyback transformer so that sends in that high voltage into the back and at the same time your image quality and your data is sent in through this neckboard and all the images processed from the back end here it's your signal goes in and it comes out the tube but the information is sent from the neckboard and then there's other parts to this individual CRT that you know make it function we've got our main board at the bottom and then we've got again at the back here excuse me the back here our input board and then you can see where we've got RGB into this particular monitor now a standard CRT in the North America will not support RGB it'll support normally composite video or RF video or even if you have a better one I might have S video and then component inputs but RGB is just straight red green and what's up Ash yeah thanks for coming in so you're you're not doing any processing on your colors you're just sending them straight into the monitor again that was not a standard that people were using in America so we never really got a at-home use for it but these monitors were commercially produced so they had the inputs for that because they had commercial products that would use RGB and then the reason that RGB is just so coveted now is because it's the best way to get retro games clearest picture quality as you can is through straight RGB into something that can read RGB properly you guys can hear the cold snort in the background so I'm just gonna like tell you my critique so far for myself is sometimes I feel like I'm just going and going and going which is okay but it's hard to remember what you've gone over he's literally just snoring I can't believe that yeah no that's that's how he snores he just sometimes he just lays their stores like that you can't it's hard to sleep with him in the room if he's sleeping oh man there you go anyway let me show you just a quick look you could see well that's not the right one there we go there he is there he goes oh goodness okay sorry about that one all right so we're gonna keep rolling through this it starts to get good once I actually get into the presentation of course I have to go through safety and a little bit about how RGB works I want to make this a little bit shorter so I can allow more time for for the Q&A session and thankfully with this device you don't need anything else you don't need any other devices to try to you know descramble that or convert it into something that can be used on a modern TV this one just takes it accepts it and spits out the image so that's a little bit about that now the image quality we're going for here again is higher but also on the flip side of that the reason the reason again these are so desirable is the video signal itself from the older devices is actually a lower resolution than most modern devices will even be able to handle or properly interpret so what I mean by that is this is running in the old school either 480 I interlaced that's when I say I that's another acronym interlaced video or if we're going down even lower than that in video games we're going to 240p which is just 240 lines on the screen of progressive progressive display and so that is the reason that when you look at this screen and if you guys want to look at this later you're welcome to at the end of this but if you come up and look at real close you'll actually see the blacked out lines because this screen can display again 480 lines but it's only showing 240 lines are lit up so the other four or the other 240 are left out blank and that gives this black line in between each line and so you don't have any flicker on the image you don't have any or you get an extra sharp look but and it's called scan lines so you hear that term that's what scan lines are and then the other format would be 480 I and the way this interprets that is it's going to show 240p twice almost so it swaps the it shows it interlaced so it it's not always progressive like this it's flashing back and forth the two 240 lines and then that's why it might flicker on the screen when you're watching for example like standard definition television or an older movie or something so this thing here we're gonna do is I'm gonna move on and we're going to do some demonstrations now on this screen and we're going to go through some of the most amazing software for CRTs that you can find and that is this 240p test suite from Artimeo and this is an open-source free software that I've got a nice cartridge for it for my Super Nintendo but this software is designed to be used in old devices like a Super Nintendo and it's going to give us some incredible test patterns to be able to verify that our CRT is functioning and also what happens you could use this on other displays but it's especially effective for CRT for checking the condition of the CRT as well as making adjustments to your CRT and seeing if you're doing things the right way and how it looks afterwards so it's really set up nicely we've got test patterns in here and if I just click on test patterns we've got a bunch of different test patterns to choose from but one of the ones that I really want to focus on most of all is this monoscope pattern okay and this monoscope pattern has it just looks like you know a obviously like squares right and different shapes but we can use this kind of a pattern to judge things on our screen and we can see well okay so up here I might have a little bit of a color separation at my edge but because I can see that up here at this corner or there'll be other anomalies we can show in the screen there's even some better color separation up here so we can do things to try to improve that as we work but also if we have other things happening this monitor you have to adjust it internally so it's a lot of fun to show you guys because again this is super old some new monitors and newer televisions most of them will have a remote and you can do all this without getting inside but that wouldn't be as much fun for me to just sit around and hold a remote control and show you guys me flipping through a service menu okay that's boring so we can manipulate this image on the screen with these amazing control board back here that you guys can't see from where you're sitting unfortunately but it's just it's got little things I could stick this screwdriver in and turn and you'll see image adjustment on the screen so let's just try some of that stuff real quickly here and then we'll see what it does on the screen and then we'll see if we can make it look any even better we can judge some different things on here so I'm the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna spin one of these potentiometers on here and I'm just gonna make sure that we're doing something on the screen so you see there this is this is our horizontal size control right and it's just crazy that you could just sit back and turn this and manipulate that image but if you have an issue example if you have an issue on this TV where you see that this the horizontal size isn't big enough well then you can just expand that here and you try to expand it out to the edge like okay that looks pretty good that's a little bit better and then you look down here and there's a bunch of other ones and we'll find the next one which will be our center let's hope I can find the right one it's hard to see some of these were they're not labeled perfectly but see that's the wrong one and just start seeing if we can't find it well that's a different one see so the way that this is all working is again these potentiometers are controlling the signal that's being sent to this deflection yoke and the amount of energy being sent to this the magnetism I'm manipulating that magnetism by using the screwdriver and these potentiometers to adjust the screen and you know the reason you would want to even do this in the first place is just to give you a better-looking image on your screen we're using it and that's why we're using these tools so just to give you a little bit of a run-through on this pattern because we're going to do some more adjustment on it but if we the way this pattern does is designed is the reason we have these squares and these squares and all this stuff kind of sectioned out is because again we could have issues on any portion of this screen so we want to try to make these look uniform one of the biggest key components on here is to these are supposed to be squares so if they're a little bit oblong or wrong shape and then we can use these adjustments to try to make them these squares the same thing with this bigger square so if we see just the red square I can actually use this software and get rid of all the other squares and just use the red squares the red squares are designed to help you with your aspect ratio so naturally as I go through there and I adjust the size on the outside and the size vertically well if I did that and I didn't set that to a correct aspect ratio then I could have like a oblong shaped Mario right when I'm playing because I have not got it right on the aspect ratio so this tool is set up so that you can check your aspect ratio but to do that you just measure this side and then this side and same thing with the larger square and if those two measurements match then you have perfect aspect ratio so that's a really key thing for this tool kit and this software is we can use that to make sure that our aspect ratio is perfect and that's that will that will help again if you're playing a game and you don't want something to look a little bit misshapen the interesting thing is is when you do that and you do set it for the aspect ratio that's correct and you have to end up over scanning your image a little bit to get it to fit the screen as well as fit the screen as well as being good aspect ratio now I do apologize because they do not put these in any particular order and it's very difficult to see every little adjustment on here but I think I found what we're looking for maybe well vertical up and down all right I'm just gonna take a second take a break we are there this these like this particular monitor this four series is really great for these demonstrations simply because it's the older one and you can do as I'm showing a lot of manipulation of the image by just twisting some potentiometers and I'll continue to do that more I know some people are talking about pricing on stuff if you actually can keep an eye out for these older four series BV PVMs in your local area sometimes you can find them for cheaper because they're basically unshippable unless you ship them through you ship they are unshippable because this this whole bezel cracked one day when I grabbed it while I was moving the CRT just around in my shop and I just grabbed the front of the bezel and tried to push it around a little bit it just snapped right off in my hands this plastic is very brittle and old but anyway I thank you for everybody for hanging out and still watching this we're gonna continue on because it's gonna get into the good part of the presentation and I'm gonna kind of give my thoughts at the end on what I'd like to see more of and less of and then you can also give me some feedback and then so that's you know rather than me getting too much into those parts that's kind of the adjustments for specifically geometry is you would go in and you would play with these you would check with this pattern and again just try to get that all lined up and then that will get you good aspect ratio now some other things that we can do is we can talk about some other issues that you will probably find in a CRT and we will like try to go ahead and almost mimic that here again with this thing so again I was talking about this deflection yoke and this thing is very finicky so if at any time it's leaning a tiny bit you'll see a big lean on the screen or if it tilts one direction it'll completely mess up the image quality on the sides of the screen and so we'll just to show you basically how that looks I'm just gonna open this here and we're this is the part around a little bit I'm gonna mess with them watch and you can see how the image looks right it changed a lot did it change a lot I mean like it's just crazy that you could it's all magnetism and if that is not again set correctly that easily easily over time that can move right because I mean these machines is from 93 that's almost 30 years so very often that will move and you'll have a crooked screen okay but something else that can happen is this can let's go to a different type of test pattern and that should be our colors white red and blue and green okay so it's a white screen okay if this starts to go back a little bit look at our colors on the side if our yoke comes back in just a tiny bit it completely goofs up the colors and you might look at this and think this like tube is shot or something but it's really all it is is the fact that the yoke is not pushed back up into place and same thing you know you'll get different you might have a color here and you could see where you'll have a big purple washout or something so that is just shows you how much how finicky this thing can be right okay okay so this was this was probably like the highlight of the show but I had to get like 20 minutes to get to this point so I wonder if maybe next year I'll maybe start by just saying this is a CRT and just start doing this stuff to get everybody kind of captivated to begin with and walk through it in the after you know doing this I know that's the worst thing one day I'm just gonna slip and accidentally stick my hand in the wrong spot and at least I'll be be leaving this world doing what I love to do all right just joking there so we're gonna continue on but this was pretty much the highlight section where people were really you know in the audience were really impressed I know it's like a lot of empty spots right there but I suppose a pretty good turnout for my show I want to say there was like 30 people about in this one the other thing that may happen is you may have components that go bad actually on the board and that's gonna be normally electrolytic capacitors and what that will do is that will make it so the adjustments that I was trying to make wouldn't actually do anything on the screen or they would make the screen not look quite right it might always look oblong it might always have a hook at the top this one doesn't have those issues but if you want to I can go around and show you some some CRTs on the floor with some issues and I could show you what's what we could defer define what each one of those is but so you may have an instance where you can't even get something in perfect shape because the capacitors may need to be replaced because capacitors were only meant to last like 15 years and again we're already past that on most of these machines so the bigger lastly on these adjustments there's there's other things too that will affect our image quality now the the flyback sends and we talked about that sends that high current that 31,000 volts in well if it it also has to be tuned and I'll show you that how that looks maybe I could just leave it on this screen and you'll probably be able to tell pretty good and what we have to tune on that is called our focus so this sent in a beam and then it's actually got focused so if I turn you see how blurry we can you guys see how blurry it just got and like it doesn't look sharp at all well that could be a simple thing of turning the short the potentiometer on the back of the flyback so that beam is focused it's literally called focus on the back of the TV and then another one that's fun is our convergence and I'm not going to get into the details of just like corner convergence because that can be very finicky and it's it's it's more of a advanced level of repair there if you ever have to mess with convergence rings in the corners but there is an overall master convergence control on a CRT so not everyone but the high-end ones do have it and if I adjust that see that that the the beams on an electron gun are shot in three major primary colors red green and blue and again that has to be lined up perfectly or you'll see colors separate so that's what I see see see separation here of blue green and red so that just means those beams have been spread out too far and it the the attempt is for the machine to send send those in and make it clear but if you don't have that adjusted correctly we we get it separated on our screen so those are just some of the more master controls that are on most CRTs and the one of the more fun things here I wanted to check us out on time we're doing good is let's go back to a white red green and blue screen so this is a good check for a couple of things first off sometimes again a CRT will have three primary colors that it's pushing on a color tube if we're if the colors don't look right there's a there's a chance that one of the colors is out in the tube and what happens is over time this is an unrepairable problem unfortunately what happens is the gun that's inside this tube shorts out one of the colors it shoots three colors red green and blue well occasionally one of those colors two of those colors can short out and then you pull up these color screens on this test pattern and you can cycle through them and it'll show you each individual color so that we have red green and blue so we can verify that all three of those colors are still working and then white is just all those colors at once and it's maxed out and that's pushing all those colors and black is everything off no image so that's that's a way to test the tube to make sure that you're getting colors but also we have since this is all magnetic and everything is affected by magnetism on a CRT we can we can get magnetic interference on to our screen and that can be because we set a unsheathed speaker too close to it and then this color will change or it could be from a magnet in your pocket or you just pushing a magnet on the screen and you can get a magnetic issue so I'm gonna push this back up a little bit try to get rid of that purple down at the bottom and we're gonna do a demonstration here of magnetism and how it affects the screen what will happen to the screen and then we'll correct it but just so you know this is this is something again this is a pretty specialty tool here and it can be dangerous and a fire hazard if you don't know how to use it that that's really a rare situation where something like that would happen but it this this thing right here is called a degausing wand and it is a commercial piece of equipment that generates an enormous amount of energy it's gonna generate a magnetic field and then it will you can't keep running it too long because it gets extremely hot it'll melt so you don't want to like use it for more than two minutes and that's really the big warning but what this does is if we get some magnetic interference on this tube it's very hard to get that off and clear it up now a lot of these will have a manual degauser and that's what you hear at the beginning of a when you turn the TV on and sometimes you're that bomb gong sound that is the internal degauser going off and it's trying to balance that magnetism but it does not usually more powerful enough to get rid of outside magnetism so for the demonstration we're gonna introduce some funky magnetism to this so if I just do this we are gonna whack out the colors right so there it is right I I I've gotten this one of the one of the fun things I like to do on my YouTube channel is I love to go and buy CRTs that are listed as being in great condition and then you know you get them home don't worry guys thankfully the CRT repair wands are still made so you don't have to worry about the price going up on them even though we're talk about them home you fire it up you unbox the thing and then you turn it on and you're like oh this is a perfect condition right it looks great so I mean because if you if I I know that's a red screen but if I go back here and I like start up my normal software we saw how it looked at the beginning well now I'm like what the heck I you know that doesn't look right and and no amount of see let's see if we power cycle this maybe we can hear that gong because this one doesn't have oh it does have the ability for me to do it I'm sorry I'm a dummy okay let's let's let it go turn back on and see there's is a degauss button for this one see it'll do that oh well see that did too good of a job see so that one cleared it up so that's that wasn't any fun that's you know that's not there we go so the internal degausser you can't clear it up sometimes but if that doesn't clear it up and you hit it it still looks like this that's where this magic wand comes in to handy and I'm gonna show you how we use this to clear this screen up and the best thing to do is for me to go back to that color page so you can kind of see it a little bit better but okay I like using the red it seems to come out really nicely so the proper way this method you got to kind of hold it and slowly go in and make a circular motion get close to the screen and then that's my favorite part right it looks pretty darn cool and then you slowly back away make your screw ring bigger hole and almost pull your power supply off but we're good and that's it that's like demagnetized the electrons have been balanced and it's literally just that easy with the right tools because otherwise how would you ever figure that out I mean it's like it's an issue that's correctable and just a lot of these tricks and things that I've been talking about have just been forgotten and we've got to do kind of our I'm doing my part try to you know preserve this information and help out now well I've gone for about 30 minutes here and I'd want to give an opportunity to anybody if they have any kind of questions about anything I've said if you'd like me to explain anything a little bit further okay all right yes yes yes so that's you know the there's another what looks to be about 20 minutes of questions and out of respect it does show people on here so I mean it doesn't really matter but if you want to watch the Q&A session I'll leave that you know you go find this video and retro tech how our CRT works from the music city multi-con page you could check it out and see the rest the rest of that presentation there if you want to see the whatever I'm sorry the Q&A so that's that's it and like next it's gonna be October before you know it you know October I'm sure it'll be 28th is the Saturday that's the day I'll be scheduled to give a presentation again and I'm going to do I'm going to do a presentation just like that only I want to make it better that was the first time I did it so it was a little bit you know jumping around a little bit sporadic at some points and I'd like to I think go from the talking so much and building up to the the last third of the presentation being the fun part with the demonstrations I feel like it would be better if I could somehow get it where the first third is the demonstrations and then the next two-thirds of the presentation or more of the talking and the explanation and things like that and again if you're interested in seeing this presentation live you can come to the music city multi-con October 27th to 29th in Tennessee there's information on hotel deals it's not a very expensive convention to have to attend as far as lodging and things because it's not in downtown Nashville it is you know costs are a little bit less than if you have to travel to the northeast or something or the northwest but if you can't make it this the show runner records the presentations every year and releases them on his YouTube channel and that will be there I will also do a vlog style video just like I did for the presentation on or just like I did for the most recent trip I took out to the retro world expo so but guys that's that's really everything I had on paper to go through that's important and so if you could be there awesome and let me know you're gonna be there I'll be glad to hang out I'll have a booth I want to go and you know just have a good time I love talking to people I love talking about this stuff you're welcome to come hang out with me at the show while I'm there working at the boot my booth and so if there's any other feedback on what you thought of the presentation I'd you know feel free to add it here I do have another another show episode 2 will be coming later this week looks like Thursday like a normal schedule and I'm not sure that I'll have a video completely ready for if I do have a video ready for this Friday for an a real episode it's gonna be something short I'm not quite sure what it would be yet to be honest I have a couple things recorded but nothing else I will well let's finish out we can have a cool little discussion guys can ask some questions if you want other than that here's what I did over the weekend I actually do have some pictures of this this was a pretty fun experience I was at a looks like our Atari stopped I went out to a football game this last weekend college football or American style football okay like you know and I've got some pictures of this trip I go to or I'm a fan of a smaller school not small school but a smaller football program right now in the grand scheme of things but they're trying to move up and I think 10 years from now people are gonna really recognize them in the college football world and that's James Madison University I've got some pictures I'm gonna show you because I went to pull up the drive folder see if I can pull up these these files so I go to these games usually always go to the home games season ticket holder Wow these are all over the place as far as order so let's let me show you some of these pictures okay it was a fun time at this game and I'll just switch over to this and pull up some pictures so here's this is this is the home game experience for me they here's a good picture of home game okay like you have to walk you and there's time and there's a couple of ways that it takes a while you can walk through a line there's me this was last weekend not or not this was two weekends ago sorry this was our first home game there's our seats and that's stadium it seats about 25,000 people it's not the biggest stadium but that whole section you see across the area is gonna be bulldozed and then they'll make it like a 50,000 seater but it's a beautiful stadium right you can see the mountains in the background there's a train track going through right over in this area so I really love it the football is really good too you know team one there's the student section it gets really wild over in there like they're down there partying that's always funny to watch so this is the home game here's the big nice screen really cool athletic department like workout area behind it it's given it a really cool you know feel for a stadium anyway we go to them all the time well this last weekend was an out-of-town game in Charlottesville which is one hour away at a bigger school the University of Virginia and the interesting thing I will mention first about this game was the the cornfields the University of Virginia had a situation last year where a player on the team shot three or four other teammates and killed three of them and because of that it messed the whole football program up they canceled canceled their whole season last year after that happened and this was their first home game since all that had happened so there was a ceremony you know ahead of time I'll show you some stuff from that ceremony because I actually did get a couple pictures of that but the game just turned out to be so wild so it was you know there's a lot of tension but at the same time this is so close to where we are and we're a football program that's building that's really looking forward to this matchup because it's a crosstown kind of rival it's somebody who always thinks they're better than you kind of thing they're a bigger program bigger team and we were like you know so we're there like all right this is a chance for us to go and get a big win here and we're pumped so there's a lot of fans like I'm gonna tell you the truth half the people in the stadium was 60,000 people in the stadium half them were wearing purple for JMU because again it's less than an hour drive from the campus and our fan base is super ignited so I do have some pictures of the stadium as it started to get going and it is I mean it is massive and the best part about this because I had my seats were third row at right here at the 40-yard line and right behind the bench of all the team that my home team right so I'm right behind there like I was yelling at the players said hey come on man just go out there and crush them and of course they would be like yeah Steve's right you know go go go so this was the early parts of the game everything's gonna set up this is when they're starting to do the ceremony and this was what I thought was quite interesting there look at this this this is their student section now they a vast majority of their student section is this hill yeah so it's a hill like a steep hill right it's a hill it's it's a messy dirty hill right there that's where all the kids are I'm only bringing that out because it there's me like right look how far I mean I was all the way almost front row with my son and my father there and this was our view like right right here's the teams here's a field it was great let's see what else we got here this is this is a picture of a guy like skydiving in I might have a video that yeah check this video out okay so you see that that's like they had these guys coming in that was pretty cool here this might be the other guy he came in really fast oh no this was kickoff so I realized maybe you guys are football fans it's okay it's not that's not really I'm trying to think if there's anything I don't even remember what these videos are okay so this is again just after stadium fills up some it was a beautiful day and there I am right having a great time okay down there lots of purple lots orange and yeah I had to fight to get so how I got these seats I went to I went to the University of Virginia's website the day they sold their their seats online like the day they opened ticket seats and 15 minutes later I bought these seats these this third row package only like 75 a piece so I was happy but let's see how many okay I wanted to show this picture because this one this this is that stupid hill right stupid hill first half and look how rowdy it's getting over there it's all college kids so what happened here right look at this hill there's the field right there the field of play in Charlottesville and this started to get dirty these kids up here you know they're there of course having a good time but one of these boys slid you can see how it messed up that Matt he slid down the hill down in here and one of these cops came and grabbed him like he was running on the field ready to streak the place and it I mean it was disgusting just like tackle them and stuff and so I took this picture because right after that look how many they said every big boy pork chop out there to watch just this JMU student section they sent every you know every boss hog in in the county to watch them and it was it was just something that I saw that you know it was it was annoying but what can you say so what what ends up happening in this game well I think this is the last photo I took very last photo I took full stadium right there at the 50 yard line a play going on we came out to an early lead then all of a sudden Virginia started to come back and by half time it was close close game and then the second half started and Virginia just took off scored a bunch of touchdowns and took they were about like let's see they were up by 11 points that's what happened and it and then man you should see those UVA fans they did they were pissed off at me when I was in that section because they were even I mean again they were winning and I was sitting here I can't even see if I could see the score at that point I can't remember I was sitting here and I'm gonna tell you the truth this was the most annoying thing so whenever Virginia would score a point or sometimes even just get a good play they'd all grab each other's shoulders and they do this and they'd start singing the dumb New Year's Eve song and so they're going on doing this over and over again every time they do something good it is so just annoying and stupid so there was a big play in the third quarter and it was a controversial play it doesn't matter like you go watch if you care about sports and go watch all this stuff it's already been commented on on like bigger outlets they would what happened was is we got a fumble their quarterback fumbles the ball we get it back they review the play they say it's not a fumble and everybody's like it's a clear fumble so these dad gum yeah these dad gum fans start singing again they stop singing finally the play stops and I get some so mad I'm just like you and I just start like mocking it right I'm just like mocking it I'm like the refs love you VA so much yes yes they are so lame and that when I'm doing this you should have seen all the like smart ass doctors and UVAs they were sitting in like the third row just looking at me like scum of the earth like this guy is a disturbing ugly dog we want to put him down and I said guess what suckers I'm going back to Harrisonburg and I coming back here you you guys are you guys are two chicken they only play once UVA will only play us once every 40 years so I was like you won't have to see me again so pretty much right after that fumble happens I'm in there just talking stuff all the sudden the sky opens up and an unbelievable amount of rain just starts pouring down and and I'm looking up I like what the heck just happened and there's an announcement saying all right folks the game has been postponed due to like duty to weather in the area and I'm like what and it starts raining cat like a buckets like and the thing is is I'm in the third row and it's way long for me to get out of there like it's like 75 rows to get back to where you can actually get to the concourse and get under some cover in this stadium if I go back here maybe I can get you a good shot I mean if you see where's that picture of me looking back up at the stadium if I can find that one behind the seats anyways anyways this is probably a good shot so I'm down here in like this area and I have to run all the way up these stairs to try to get under this place where another thousands of people are hiding to try to get out of the rain where the rain sits there and they start our hey listen to this what do you what's the one song you play you would never play if your opponent is fired up on the road trying to come back and win what's the one song you should never play if their colors are purple you should never play purple rain as everyone is leaving the stadium so the idiots over at uva they motivated everybody in jmu by playing purple rain purple rain and everybody in purple is like yeah dukes it was so amazing I do have to say that I found a uh let's see if I can find it on my twitter feed here I want to show you this there the the stadium was pretty much cleared out and the biggest badasses of the day were the marching royal duke band uh that's the band um all right let's see here four jmu let me just go find my twitter feed hopefully I can find where I shared it these look at this these crazy kids these crazy kids this is when the storm was called right look at this there they are they sent them up in the 300 level during a lightning storm and they just sat there like badasses and continued to play on the fight songs for jmu like it was the titanic and they were on there trying to like you know improve morale and look at all these people running for the stands running so I'm there laughing I'm laughing at the uva fans I'm telling them I said hey you're gonna have to stay off four quarters if you think you're going to win this game and and uh they were like yeah right we're leaving and they all bailed I'm like 90% of them bailed and it was great you go back you can see jmu pulled off an amazing comeback 12 points the last 10 minutes after the one hour delay the stadium was basically emptied of 90% of the uva fans and only people left were jmu and the uva poor the uva faithful and uh they got to experience you know jmu's great comeback we won 36 to 35 and actually our students that you saw down there being being boss hogged they all rushed the field nobody got in trouble and we celebrated on their field the victory uh of the day so that was basically the the the name of the show today was behind enemy lines and that's what it was behind enemy lines uh but that's the story I uh I hope I didn't run off the entire audience there if you guys really really enjoyed it let me know as far as beer sales I will tell you that they've changed all the rules changed all the rules they let you buy as many beers as you want now they used to limit you to two beers uh a game and this year they've cut all that loose man they like if you're 21 you could drink as many beers as you can have just like the nfl which is wild to me uh because there were a lot of people that you know get inebriated and yes two and oh and I'll be back at another football game on the 30th so uh during the you know live show I'll update you if anything crazy happens because it's it's a lot of fun and it's uh it's been it's been just a great experience like my whole family goes down there my wife works at the university it's just a it's just a blast so oh my goodness yeah pricing yeah I don't I hate to go check my wallet or my uh bank's credit card statement because I buy a nine dollar beer as a pop nine dollars which isn't that bad but it's not great it's nine dollars for a 16 ounce beer yeah 16 ounces about a pint right it's the bigger can it's not the little regular cans so that's uh that's a great way to start the show I think we hit we hit a one hour one hour and a half had some fun uh the dog the poor dog look at him he never he didn't even wake up he just been back here snoring for you guys the whole time so anyway thank you guys so much for joining me today I know it's a little bit different off the wall you know next time we're actually gonna probably have to do some work because Thursday I'm gonna need to do some soldering so maybe we'll have fun on the first one to make everybody's Monday a little bit more enjoyable and then we'll get to some more nitty-gritty hard working on Thursday live streams uh but I had fun today I hope you did too and again if you don't mind if you haven't already do me a favor and hit the like button I appreciate all you guys I know so many of you are uh patreon members too so thank you so much I see in the chat every time we have a stream uh thank you everybody to come in today I will see you all next time later on this week on Thursday baby let's do it Thursday I'll see you then