What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs CRT?

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lidnariq
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by lidnariq »

NewRisingSun wrote:Any idea about the console and TV combination resulting in what I have observed?
Not really... if you can dig up a very long cable (at least 10m) to run from the Famicoms to the TV, that would be informative. At that length, the spacing between reflections should be comparable to a pixel width, making reflections visible as luma artifacts instead of doing something to chrominance.

You could also try using cable with explicitly wrong impedance instead. CVBS is almost always over 75Ω cable, but twisted pair as used in ethernet is 110Ω instead.
NewRisingSun wrote:Reflections themselves may not cause differential phase distortion. But different reflections can cause differently-spaced comb filtering, which will cause different cancellations of original signal components, in turn causing different changes in amplitude, causing different phase distortion in any powered stage on the part of the TV set that displays the signal.
Sure. Reflections could tickle clipping behavior (and thus phase distortion) at this stage, but...
I don't know how to measure the impedance of any input or output, but from what I have read, it's not as simple as holding an Ohmmeter to it.
For something like a TV, where we really do expect a properly impedance matched input, we don't usually need to worry about reactances or nonlinear stages. They're almost always a high-input-impedance amplifier in parallel with proper termination, and so measuring the input impedance is just measuring the resistance.

Measuring the output impedance is more complicated, especially since we're anticipating something changing the impedance as a function of voltage. I can't think of a good way to do this without an oscilloscope.
NewRisingSun
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by NewRisingSun »

lidnariq wrote:You can see the 2C04's DACs in the upper left corner of the die shots here. I'm having a hard time reading it, but I don't see any reason to think there's a nonlinearity in the die.
Non-linearity may not be the right word. What I mean is that many arcade PCBs use resistors for RGB bits that are not perfect multiples of each other. For example, the original Donkey Kong used 1k/470/220 ohm resistors, which yields slightly different bit weights than one would get when merely multiplying values 0-7 with 255/7. It's also not uncommon to use different resistors for blue than for red and green.
tepples
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by tepples »

I was mostly referring to the fact that levels 0-1 and 6-7 on a Mega Drive/Genesis VDP are spaced much farther apart than, say, 3-4.
lidnariq
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by lidnariq »

NewRisingSun wrote:Non-linearity may not be the right word. What I mean is that many arcade PCBs use resistors for RGB bits that are not perfect multiples of each other. For example, the original Donkey Kong used 1k/470/220 ohm resistors, which yields slightly different bit weights than one would get when merely multiplying values 0-7 with 255/7. It's also not uncommon to use different resistors for blue than for red and green.
Fortunately, non-linearity is the right word here also.

On the 2C04's die, you can see eight total MOSFETs per output, so much like the 2A03's audio DACs, they're as linear as they could manage. (The MOSFET gates are the vertical red lines surrounded by vertical white lines on both sides)

The design is unipolar and appears to be sinking current, so unlike the pull-up nMOSFETs and external the pull-down resistor with the 2A03's audio path there's no obvious source of nonlinearity here.

The PNP-based emitter-follower is probably actually just serving as a straight current amplifier on the RGB PPUs.
Drag
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by Drag »

The reason color 22 looks purplish is because of the clipping process when going from YIQ to RGB. Color 22 generates an extremely strong blue that is very far out of the RGB range. If you connect your NES to an LCD, and turn the brightness down a bit, as you turn it down, you'll see SMB's sky changes differently before it starts dimming with the rest of the colors. This might also be the explanation for Virtual Console NES games having a dimmed palette.

The phase of hue 8 is identical to the hue of the colorburst signal, which has been documented as being a greenish yellow. My reference CRT displays hue 8 as "simpsons yellow", or marigold. Why? Absolutely no clue, and there's a million different reasons it could be. It could be due to skin tone enhancement circuitry, the hue as a whole might be tweaked slightly, it could be the specific phosphors used in the TV, there's really no way to know unless you can decap the circuitry which translates the YIQ into the voltages for the electron gun, and even then, it's going to be different for every TV.

I was never able to solve why hue 8 is so weird. :P
NewRisingSun
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by NewRisingSun »

Because as pointed out some time ago, color 8 is not exactly color burst phase at all brightness levels as a result of brightness-dependent phase shift. The same applies to color 0x22, although blue clipping does play a role in it as well.
Drag
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Re: What is the deal with colors $22 and $x8 range? LCD vs C

Post by Drag »

Oh! So there's been more developments? Sorry, I've been out of the loop for a while. :P

The issue I have with the brightness-skew is that, for me, hue 8 darkens to brown, and hue C darkens to blue, and these are shifts that are in opposite directions to each other, but the numbers seen to suggest that the skew is in the same direction for all hues. Maybe I just need to look at more examples, but I'm not convinced that the brightness skew is the biggest factor in the colors we're seeing.
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