looking for a software-scope

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

Abox Quad Vector Scope.gif


...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:

QuadScope.gif


(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? :)
 
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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.
 
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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 :geek:
 
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.

aaw-021-pioneer-1.jpg
aaw-021-pioneer-2.jpg


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.
 
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