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Post by ratty on Jun 8, 2017 3:46:59 GMT -5
If anyone's parting out or dumping their PJ, I am looking for the following bits and pieces for the Barco 808 series: The plastic flap that covers the built in remote, in undamaged condition. Looking for 2 pcs. The little plastic latch/lock thing that locks said cover in place when machine is on ceiling. Looking for 2 pcs. IRIS camera lens cap. Looking for 2 pcs.
Convergence tray. Just the sheet metal in undamaged condition. Looking for 1 pc. Lens cap set for HD117 Looking for 1 set. COG board, both versions Looking for 1 pc each. Contrast mod bd Looking for 1 pc.
(Also still looking for an aluminium housed HD18 lens and C-element set, and two sets of lens-caps for them.)
Send me a PM if you have any of these lying around and no real use for them
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Post by ratty on Jun 7, 2017 4:26:02 GMT -5
Thanks for the tip Barclay, I will have to try that, I think the connectors should reach easily. Case, the CPC has the painting on it, so it should not have moved during transit. Now that you mention the word astigmatism though, I will have to check the electronic astig, I don't remember seeing it at all in the menus, and I did do a full reset after it was mounted. My other LC 808 should be arriving today evening, so I will soon have the chance to compare the colours on a HD-117-24 with the modded Onyx On a slightly different note, is there a surefire method to set the projector perfectly perpendicular to the screen? I suspect I didn't manage to do that perfectly despite measuring all four corners of the PJ to the screen with string (string's slightly stretchy, no matter how much you're trying to watch out for it).
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Post by ratty on Jun 5, 2017 12:00:03 GMT -5
The CPC is still factory painted, this is the Onyx with original tubes (only changed lenses), coils are tight against the deflection yokes, and there's no signs of a bad CPC setup (ie, when adjusting electronic focus with a dot pattern, the dot stays perfectly round). I am leaning more and more towards aging capacitors, especially since I noticed that at warmup with a full-white raster, the fans seem to slow down slightly as if the powersupply was getting taxed.
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Post by ratty on Jun 5, 2017 5:05:23 GMT -5
So yesterday saw my first extended test of the Onyx, and I have mixed feelings about the set. The colours are obviously better, the haloing is also virtually gone, and I could focus the green tube amazingly well. So that sounds all fine and dandy, but I am not at all happy with the red tube. The sad part is I don't think it's a magnetics issue. When focusing, the dot shape doesn't change, but even at it's smallest, I can barely get scanlines to show when the green clearly shows them. There is also quite a bit more drift after warmup in the convergence circuits than in my 808s, despite the fact that that set is past 11000 hours runtime and this one only has some 4xx hours on it. I think this may be the case of aging capacitors, except for the red focus. I think that's just the way that tube is There is also a slight, erratic shifting of the image left and right. It seems to be erratic and random, and on the 3m wide screen it is a movement of maybe 5mm maximum, but it seems to be constant. Probably caps on the H board ? I also have an issue that may or may not be projector related, though I suspect it is both the PJ and my signal chain. Even when I have scanlines on the screen, the video seems somewhat out of focus, as if outlines of stuff on the screen were somewhat blurred. There is also a slight amount of video noise (not visible from seating position). It may be the fact that I have an AC cable running along my signal cable, or just the fact that it is a mess in the back of my equipment rack until I recieve my BNC crimping tool sometime next week. I think the projector may be involved as well, as it seems as if the text in the menus of the projector also becomes slightly blurred after 4-5 hours of on-time. Overall I think this machine still needs some TLC to bringi t back up to spec simply because of the age of the components. For the time being it stays in place until I have the other set here (hopefully on wednesday!) and I will start looking through what boards are in there and do the mix-and match. I will have to order some good quality caps.
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Post by ratty on Jun 4, 2017 10:40:26 GMT -5
The advantage is that the 5515 can do different standards (different PAL and NTSC standards) as well, plus it has a more versatile set of test patterns. It'd just be better to have a single generator for everything 'video' related This set is rather weird in that regard, as there is no direct RGB on the mainboard, the actual RGB signal is being created on it's own separate daughterboard direct from digital signals, and the RF or Composite modulated thigns have their own daughterboards.
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Post by ratty on Jun 4, 2017 3:15:00 GMT -5
Does anyone know anything about these pattern generatos? I have them both and would like to do some mods, but not sure whether I should proceed.
So the 5514V is a video only generator, it can output composite video, or RGB via BNC plugs. The 5515 on the other hand is a full-function generator, that can do everything from test patterns to RF and teletext output even, however the one I have doesn't have the RGB module installed.
What I would like to do is to remove the entire RGB board from the 5514, and install it into the 5515. If you know the system, you know it's a modular bus-system inside. The RGB module is a 'standard plug' card, so I am fairly certain electronically it is compatible, however, I am not sure how the module actually works. Whether it is addressed, and would need a change of system ROM, or if the system is supposed to auto-detect the installed boards at startup.
If anyone has any info on this, do let me know. I would not like to start swapping things unless I know I can make it work.
Thanks!
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Post by ratty on Jun 1, 2017 14:39:31 GMT -5
Great gesture. Gregstv, if you ever get to try them out, let me know if they're any sharper than standard 8" tubes.
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Post by ratty on Jun 1, 2017 14:37:15 GMT -5
I'll cross that bridge when I get there, for the moment I'm really just trying to figure out what I can use to actually make this work for gaming. The quadros are just way too expensive to do driver-level blending and still get decent 3d gaming performance out of them without leaving an arm and a leg.
Is there actually a software blending solution that can blend more than just movies over an extended desktop? And not costing an arm and a leg wouldn't hurt either. (IE no companies that charge you $2000 for a custom version of their software.)
As for colours and ramps, I'm going to have the same lenses, the same tubes projecting from the same projector types, going to colour calibrate them to the same levels hardware-wise, then keep my fingers crossed. With any luck the blend zone's going to come out right with the blending units I have though gamma may be tricky. We'll see.
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Post by ratty on Jun 1, 2017 10:12:01 GMT -5
Thanks, I actually looked at that, but those cards are pretty old. I could actually afford their Quadro equivalents second hand fairly easily now. My problem really is I that I want to do some gaming as well. And all this is really only necessary because I want to use higher resolution than HD. The main problem is that my blending scalers only go up to 2048x2048, which is more than perfect for full HD coming out of a single HDMI port, because I can feed the same 1920x1080 resolution image to both processors, and use them to split the image into the parts I want. That is perfect for a blu-ray player or my PS3/4. But for gaming I would like to use a higher horizontal resolution. Unfortunately doing the same (splitting the image with the processors) is impossible with the scalers above 2048 pixels (which is not much higher than 1920, so there's not much point to it). My perfect solution would be to split the desktop on the GPU, and then leave the blending itself to the two processors. With that, something like 25xx*1080 should be no big deal.
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Post by ratty on Jun 1, 2017 8:21:28 GMT -5
So I've been looking up what I could find regarding edge-blending with a PC for gaming as well as movies, and based on what GPU manufacturers offer, I have come to a simple conclusion: GPU manufacturers are all money-grubbing *********.
The only actually working solutions I found:
Matrox - Second hand cards for dual-head are cheap, but these lack any sort of processing power. Short of watching films, they are not good for anything.
Nvidia Quadro - These are virtually GeForce cards with lowered clock speeds, and a pricetag premium that is so high, you might as well buy a car instead. These do support nvidia's tiling and overlapping software, Mosaic, and even edge-blending, which is good, but at this price you'd expect a lot more performance. There are affordable used units out there, but their processing power is literally less than half of their GeForce siblings (which do have the same GPU cores and often even less RAM!)
Nvidia GeForce - Would be nice, but Mosaic doesn't support the GeForce line at all (despite the still insane pricetag of my GTX 1080). You can use 'surround', but it will not let you create overlapping areas, much less do the actual edge-blending.
AMD Eyefinity - ATI is dead. RIP. (Joke aside, AMD is crap, and eyefinity pretty much does what nVidia surround does, not allowing overlapping areas between screens.)
Does anyone know of a driver-hack perhaps that would allow creation of overapping areas with nVidia? I don't even need the actual blending shader (I can do that with external hardware), only the ability to take the 'frame correction' factor in nVidia Surround to negative to create the overlapping areas.
Or is there affordable blending software out there that actually works?
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Post by ratty on May 31, 2017 5:57:58 GMT -5
Youll need an LM1881 to use composite video as sync, that will give you seperate H/V sync. That's what's inside the black box
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Post by ratty on May 30, 2017 14:09:04 GMT -5
Scart cables are now all sorted, turns out that while the 808s at least tries a moment before denouncing composite video as sync "unsyncable" (Huh huh... that was awful), the Onyx doesn't even make an attempt, just keeps a blank screen up. Also the TvOne scalers don't like composite video as sync either and also just give a black screen. Odd. Anyways, my problem was in fact that I misread the DVD setup menu and it was still giving composite video as sync. Found a use for the dud battery of the camera I just canned, and after tossing the batteries out of the housing, I used it as a case for my homebrew sync separator Ta-daaaa: Yes, that is indeed an ancient Nokia charger used as the powersupply I installed it between in-out nr8 of my analog RGBHV matrix switcher, so I can just patch it in for SCART sources whenever I need it. Makes it easier to make RGB cables for consoles and whatnot On the downside, the transport for my 808LC in Belgium was a no-show. I need to find an affordable and reliable method to get it to Hungary and it's not proving very easy.
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Post by ratty on May 29, 2017 17:36:57 GMT -5
Barco 808 retros are EM. There is also an NEC retro set that I saw pics of but it appears to be very rare.
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Post by ratty on May 29, 2017 11:04:26 GMT -5
I actually checked the tube bell dimensions between the P16s in the barco LC housings and the E8508 tubes, and they're pretty much the same, also matching with the Toshiba tubes used in some arcade game RP sets. But yeah the thin neck is definitely a problem, not to mention the shipping and asking price are out of my league.
At the moment though my focuse shifted back to the lenses, as I have a BD808LC with pristine p16 tubes on it's way to me. With that, I should be good to go for the blend once I swap the electronics around and get a set of lenses to match the others.
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Post by ratty on May 29, 2017 9:38:01 GMT -5
Everything's fixed. Added a sync separator and it finally works. My cable was okay afterall. It's odd that I got nothing on screen with the composite video as sync, not even a flicker. Oh well. At least this was an excuse to make the sync separator loop in my RGB switcher that I would have had to do sooner or later anyways for my consoles.
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