looking for a software-scope

[Jim the Oldbie]

What the hell, here's a screen shot of the Abox setup:

...And here's a little ani-GIF of the scope in action, playing this part of BS&T's "God Bless The Child" in a short loop:

(It's a little choppy, because I reduced the frame rate to 15 fps to keep the file size down.)

You can see David's solo vocal front & center, then the piano on the right, between front & rear. When the band comes in, the channel vectors are just visible as a large 'X' across the screen. But they're not as well defined as they are on an old-school scope, because there's an important feature of the analog CRT that's missing from this emulation. Can anyone guess what it is?

 

[skherbeck]

Someone said "Rectification"

 

[DuncanS]

Persistance

 

[skherbeck]

Just want to say I’m amazed by what you’re doing, Jim... it’s way over my head, but soooooo cool!

 

[bevergerner]

Hi,
I´m very interested in that what you are doing - and will follow the thread

many thanks to you

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

You're welcome Jörg! It's been interesting for me as well.

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

Persistance

You got it Duncan!

On a CRT screen, because of the way the phosphor brightness decays over time (like a comet's tail), it appears brighter in the areas of the screen where the beam visits more often, to keep it lit up. This provides a useful contrast, and more visual information. In my little computer scope, when the lines are drawn, they stay drawn at full brightness until they are replaced when the next video frame comes along, so there's no contrast anywhere.

With that said, I'm sure that an emulation of phosphor persistence is probably not much of a challenge to a graphics programmer, but I'm afraid that's beyond what I know anything about. I think I've got the correct "beam-steering" model up there; hopefully someone can pick up the torch and make it look better.

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

Just want to say I’m amazed by what you’re doing, Jim... it’s way over my head, but soooooo cool!

Thanks man! I'm learning some useful stuff here too, like how to make motion recordings of the desktop, etc. It's been fun.

 

[DuncanS]

You got it Duncan!

On a CRT screen, because of the way the phosphor brightness decays over time (like a comet's tail), it appears brighter in the areas of the screen where the beam visits more often, to keep it lit up. This provides a useful contrast, and more visual information. In my little computer scope, when the lines are drawn, they stay drawn at full brightness until they are replaced when the next video frame comes along, so there's no contrast anywhere.

With that said, I'm sure that an emulation of phosphor persistence is probably not much of a challenge to a graphics programmer, but I'm afraid that's beyond what I know anything about. I think I've got the correct "beam-steering" model up there; hopefully someone can pick up the torch and make it look better.

I'm an Electronic Design Engineer so have an unfair advantage

 

[sjcorne]

So can we get this into Foobar?

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

I'm sure someone could, but I'm afraid it's beyond my current ability.

 

[sjcorne]

So can we get this into Foobar?

I found this intriguing pic in an old thread- seems someone figured out how to recreate the Pioneer QX-949 scope in Foobar. I'd so love to know how this was done...

 

[Soundfield]

I found this intriguing pic in an old thread- seems someone figured out how to recreate the Pioneer QX-949 scope in Foobar. I'd so love to know how this was done...

That Pioneer “Scope” wasn’t an oscilloscope of course. It was a much simpler electro-mechanical thing, officially a “4ch Level Indicator”, it was a single LRU with Pioneer Part no. AAW-021-0. They can still occasionally be found on auction sites or from spare parts reclaimers.

Basically it seemed to be four filament lamps each behind a voltage driven shutter. The higher the signal the more of the lamp was revealed. The unit seems to have been a sealed unit so when one of the bulbs went you were stuffed. A clever bit of marketing though – at a very quick glance you might think you were getting an oscilloscope (the bezel and graticule were designed to look like the front of an oscilloscope but served no purpose)! But all you were really getting was a set of four glorified VU meters! So if you wanted to emulate this (rather than a real oscilloscope), it wouldn’t be difficult.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

I found this intriguing pic in an old thread- seems someone figured out how to recreate the Pioneer QX-949 scope in Foobar. I'd so love to know how this was done...

Say what?

did you ever find that Jonathan?

could this be it?

https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_vis_oscilloscope_d2d