240p test suite

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tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

Is it common for others to switch back and forth between solid white and a fine grid? Is there a standard test procedure that I can cite in that test's help page, analogous to the SMPTE standard defining color bars? If you are the only person who would use that feature, it would probably be better as a stand-alone ROM.

But if anyone else expresses interest, I could add Select to switch between solid color screen and a fine line grid.
SpiderWaffle
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by SpiderWaffle »

tepples wrote:Is it common for others to switch back and forth between solid white and a fine grid? Is there a standard test procedure that I can cite in that test's help page, analogous to the SMPTE standard defining color bars? If you are the only person who would use that feature, it would probably be better as a stand-alone ROM.

But if anyone else expresses interest, I could add Select to switch between solid color screen and a fine line grid.
Ya I'm not sure how many other people do those kinds of adjustments, not super common, I'm a power user :P

Could you make a stand-along that swaps between them, fine grid, full red, full white?

Also one other way to improve the fine grid is small the dot in the middle indicator, it's certainly useful to see the middle quickly without counting lines; however, certainly can be in the way when scrutinizing the very import static convergence.

a separate way to toggle it on/off would be nice, maybe ideal solution.
tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

The standalone convergence test turned out to be 1.25 KiB, but iNES format rounds that up to 16 KiB.

Left: Switch to grid (or toggle center dot)
Right: Switch to solid color (or toggle white/red)
Start: Toggle help

Automatically detects PAL or NTSC, using 7x8 pixel cells on NTSC or 8x11 pixel cells on PAL.
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SpiderWaffle
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by SpiderWaffle »

Sick, DLed, I'll check it out really soon.
Thanks!
tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

I guess I ought to post the changes I made a year ago when I was preparing the suite for release as part of Action 53 volume 3.

0.16 (2017-03-13)
  • Grid: Select toggles gray or black background (parity with Genesis test 1.15)
  • Sound test: Added "Crowd", a bytebeat composition by Kragen ported to NES by rainwarrior
  • paginate_help.py: Specify UTF-8 encoding for input file (Python for Windows instead defaults to cp1252)
  • paginate_help.py: Fix NameError in error message formation
  • paginate_help.py: Helper to raise UnicodeEncodeError, whose constructor argument order is undocumented outside interpreter source code
  • makefile: Work around %Path% quirk in Python for Windows
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SpiderWaffle
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by SpiderWaffle »

Sorry for Delay, been using this for awhile, it's great so far!
Just needs a few more of the important test options and I'll only need to use it to be a lot quicker

1. Down, accesses the black level screen with all the darkest colors compared to black talked about earlier,
2. Up, go to a color bleed screen
3. Press A while on full red or full white to cycle Green and Blue (or some other simple input scheme that doesn't lose the instant, D-right, to cycle red/white)
4. Press A while on grid to bring up overscan test with default to 1 pixel L/R, 7 pixels top bottom. Also original over-scan screen would be nice to have the pixels outside of the grey box all be white rather than everything outside of 0 0 0 0 box is also same grey, because then it's hard to tell your edge with 0 or less.
5. Press A while on black level to bring up a an eye candy screen. Something like a half/half of these two screens below would be awesome and/or a mashup of the NES characters people are most familiar with like: Belmont, Mario(s), Megman, Samus, Link, Little Mac, ect.
https://images.craigslist.org/00w0w_dk7 ... 00x450.jpg
https://images.craigslist.org/00l0l_6iG ... 00x450.jpg
6. Press B while black level to cycle a focus test screen, just white dots on black and black dots on white; or sub dots for text.


Ways to make the color bleed screen better:
The horizontal stripes are great now, but White is the most important, would want to check white bleed on ALL parts of the screen. Would be nice to have 4-6 horizontal stripes that extend ALL the way to left/right sides, and repeat that strip of white strips with section of black in between. Could also allow pressing again/holding D-up to scroll the stripes up. The reason not making it half white stripe half black stripe on full screen is that it puts too much load out at once and is harder to get an accurate bleed test. Input-A could cycle the colors Red, Green Blue could be nice to double check which colors are bleeding more. Input-B could switch to vertical or checker but not important.
tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

SpiderWaffle wrote:Just needs a few more of the important test options and I'll only need to use it to be a lot quicker

1. Down, accesses the black level screen with all the darkest colors compared to black talked about earlier,
2. Up, go to a color bleed screen
3. Press A while on full red or full white to cycle Green and Blue (or some other simple input scheme that doesn't lose the instant, D-right, to cycle red/white)
4. Press A while on grid to bring up overscan test with default to 1 pixel L/R, 7 pixels top bottom.
[...]
5. Press A while on black level to bring up a an eye candy screen.
[...]
6. Press B while black level to cycle a focus test screen, just white dots on black and black dots on white; or sub dots for text.
I wonder what the upstream developer would have to say about these UI changes.
SpiderWaffle wrote:Also original over-scan screen would be nice to have the pixels outside of the grey box all be white rather than everything outside of 0 0 0 0 box is also same grey, because then it's hard to tell your edge with 0 or less.
I hadn't considered that. But I expect a bit of "Why is there white when it's 0?" confusion. Making it black instead might cause confusion on PAL systems, which draw the border as solid black along with 1 top and 2 left and right pixels.
SpiderWaffle wrote:Something like a half/half of these two screens below would be awesome and/or a mashup of the NES characters people are most familiar with like: Belmont, Mario(s), Megman, Samus, Link, Little Mac, ect.
https://images.craigslist.org/00w0w_dk7 ... 00x450.jpg
https://images.craigslist.org/00l0l_6iG ... 00x450.jpg
I'd prefer not to include anything copyrighted by control-freak publishers. That's why I replaced the graphics in several of the tests.
SpiderWaffle wrote:Ways to make the color bleed screen better:
The horizontal stripes are great now, but White is the most important, would want to check white bleed on ALL parts of the screen.
If you mean something other than what "Full screen stripes" does, I'd like to see a mock screenshot of what you want.
SpiderWaffle
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by SpiderWaffle »

If you mean something other than what "Full screen stripes" does, I'd like to see a mock screenshot of what you want.
Basically that, but cutting out half of the lines in blocks of about 5, so it doesn't put too much load on the CRT at once and skew the results, also being able to toggle to Red, Green, Blue lines.
like this image below but repeated all the way down.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/O4QT8BSPTyPCP9wg1
I hadn't considered that. But I expect a bit of "Why is there white when it's 0?"
For me and some other friends we had the opposite confusion of why is there no border when I have the overscan set to 0 or less and I only see a defined edge with less overscan and why are there two areas of grey and one of white and which one is real border of the now TWO defined edges.
I wonder what the upstream developer would have to say about these UI changes.
Probably not for them because they want to put in tons of these superfluous test and options, much better to do that with pages of indexed items, also easier for first time users to see the name of the test before they select it each time.
I'd prefer not to include anything copyrighted by control-freak publishers. That's why I replaced the graphics in several of the tests.
I suppose that's true, rom hack generally don't provide an actual rom but rather a patch which you need a 3rd party software to patch an "illegal rom" with. It wouldn't be in the same boat. I wonder if something of a similar vien could be used though, like the bricks with leafs and text from CVIII name select screen with some other colorful pixel art thrown in. Are there just free assists of good colorful pixel part that could be imported?
tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

Patches are welcome, especially if nobody has seconded the development of a new feature such as linking the different test patterns together via some state machine.
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

The first to guess what this pic is for in 240p Test Suite wins a cookie.
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tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

240p Test Suite (NES, GB, GBA) v0.17

A minor update, largely to track updates to the Genesis version. Also includes continued size optimizations in the Game Boy version.

Highlights on all platforms:
  • Sharpness: A to show brick wall pattern (Genesis 1.16 parity)
  • Stopwatch: Add third ruler setting to show in even frames (Genesis 1.16 parity)
  • Audio sync: Move ceiling up (Genesis 1.16 parity)
  • Begin to unify help conversion tooling
  • Unify version numbers
Highlights on specific platforms:
  • Help (GB): Compress document titles with DTE
  • Help (GBA): Align line buffer to prevent corruption of nearby variables by DMA memset, fixing Down after Scroll test
  • Gray ramp (GB): Use Color tests map loader for GBC version
  • Solid screen (GB, GBA): Explain what a bad high voltage regulator does to SGB and GB Player border (requested by ISSOtm)
  • Stopwatch (GB, GBA): Draw even frame numbers in blue and odd in red (Genesis 1.16 parity)
  • Manual lag (GB): Fix all-black result screen if final press was 0 lag (reported by Great Hierophant, echoing Quietust's NES report)
  • GB: ISSOtm golfed SGB detection by 3 bytes; numerous other size optimizations and tile sheet unifications
  • GBA: Add license headers
GitHub release
Attachments
240p-test-mini-0.17.zip
ROM and source for NES, GB, and GBA versions
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tepples
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

I recently added compression improvements that saved about 10 KiB:
This let me splurge a bit, adding more detail and color to the character on the help screens to match the GBC and GBA versions.
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by tepples »

These compression improvements were in part to help keep this included as a "toy" in the full Action 53 collection. The more I keep the size down, the more other stuff the builder can squeeze into the unused area, and the more likely 240p Test Suite will meet the "Must fit" criterion. Compression improvements would also be appreciated if someone else attempts a port to the Famicom Disk System with FDSStick, as requested in a private message about a year ago, as they would help more tests' data fit in the 32 KiB RAM of the system card without loading breaks.

In an effort to hit an arbitrary 40960 byte (40 KiB) milestone, I recently took a survey of size in bytes of each test on both NES and Game Boy. The Overscan and Manual lag test were identified as two places where the size of the NES version greatly exceeds the size of the GB version. Other places were justified, largely because of the greater perimeter and area of the NES picture, but these two deserve special consideration.

Overscan on NES spends about half of its ROM space (about 1K of 2K) on calculating 32x4- and 4x30-cell tilemap update packets for the side borders. I could probably reduce this by drawing the side borders partially with sprites, the way I did with GB's right border. (It draws the left and top borders with scrolling, the bottom border with the scanline counter, and the right border with a combination of sprites and the window.)

Manual lag test on NES displays a string "Marvelous", "Perfect", "Great", "Good", "Boo", or "Miss" depending on how far the press was from 0 lag, with the appropriate color from Dance Dance Revolution. Artemio's original versions on Genesis and Super NES do not, nor does my Game Boy port. Two years ago, rainwarrior suggested that this DDR theming could trigger reflexes in users to anticipate the press, which could bias the result. Cutting this experimental feature should reduce ROM size.

I could shoot for 40K, or I could instead target 48K and add more features:
  • SpiderWaffle has requested the thin, aspect-ratio-adjusted grid of Linearity by itself, with no circles. In 0.17 and earlier, this wasn't possible, as the versions with and without grid used different nametables, and I had to put the grid-only version in a separate ROM. But now with the recent improvement to Linearity's compression, they use the same nametable, and I can use the second nametable to make a third version with just the grid.
  • SpiderWaffle has requested a PLUGE with vertical bars of all $0x colors.
  • Expand IRE to Motion blur as on GB
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orlaisadog
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Re: 240p test suite

Post by orlaisadog »

tepples wrote:The first to guess what this pic is for in 240p Test Suite wins a cookie.
Pluge. Whatever that is.
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