So, I've finalized the convergence on my Amplifone and I'm really happy with it. It's a 1000% improvement over what it was in the corners.....
BUT I still have one thing that annoys me on the monitor:
Pincushion ! You can clearly see that the lines are bend inwards, while on a CRT that is curved it looks much more natural to have it (slightly) following the curve of the CRT.
Now, the story is that SW (and some other color vectors by Atari) don't have a circuit for adjusting pincushion because this was "corrected" in the "specially designed" yokes.
Well, if this is the result, I'd say they obviously didn't do a very nice job.
I guess most would say you don't really notice it in gameplay, and to some extend, that's true, but.....I just want it fixed because I know it can be better.
F.I. when playing the intro of ESB, Darth Vader's ship really looks skewed when at the right edge of the screen and than "warps" to normal in the center. It looks wrong.
Now, the designer of the SW hardware, Jed Margolin put a nice pincushion circuit on his site, that was used for Atari's early vector games like Tempest:
Now, I'd like to try and incorporate a circuit like that to be able to correct the pincushion as it should be.
Clay Cowgill once offered this ready built, mainly aimed at those who used a WG on SW, which as we all know has a different angled tube, and thus even worse pincushion issues:
http://www.multigame.com/display.htmlHowever, it doesn't look like this kit is available anymore. If anyone has one around, I'm interested.
Alternatively, I'll have to build one myself....