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Scanlines on vector games?
Ummon:
Last year, I saw a Tempest up close. Something that really caught my attention, and something I thought I remembered from childhood, was that there were lines displayed, just like a raster monitor. I thought they were sorta vertical, but now I'm not sure. However, watching a Starcade episode recently I saw the same thing - except for Black Widow (a horizontal display) they were vertical lines; for Tac Scan (vertical display) they were horiztonal. ?????
http://starcade.tv/starcade/featuredshow-90.asp
(Incidenatlly, this doesn't seem to happen with B/W vector monitors, as my vectrex only shows what seem like scanlines with certain text, which would point to coding.)
NickG:
It is just the shadow mask /aperture grille: Vector games do not have scan-lines(see correction in CT's post ;)). Here is something to try with one of your raster monitors at home to understand what you are looking at: look at one of your monitors very closely when it is off. Do you see those lines? Those are of the aperture grille or the shadow mask. They are vertical on a horizontally positioned monitor and thus horizontal when you turn it on it's side (vertical monitor) This is the same thing you were picking out in those Donkey Kong photos in one of your other scan-line confusion threads. *they are not the scan-lines.
It may be a wise idea for you to visit wikipedia to learn about monitor technology. They have a lot of great info about this sort of thing complete with photographs, and you seem to be posting a lot of threads like this. ;)
Edit: this post was later edited for clarity* and a correction
ChadTower:
Vector monitors do display scanlines if you have the screen/brightness turned up too high. They aren't horizontal or retrace lines like a raster but they are still scanlines. They just happen to be direct XY grid movement patterns since the guns are tracing shapes rather than scanning whole horizontal lines.
If you look at a vector monitor close up (and off) you'll see the exact same thing you see with a raster. The CRT is the same.
RayB:
Ummon, what you saw is related only to the color ones. Something related to the method they use to get different colors to show up. I noticed the same thing at a fellow collector's house who has a few vector machines (both B&W and color).
RandyT:
It's also interesting to note that a hi-res PC screen is actually capable of a sharper color "vector" image than the original color vector screens. It won't be as bright, due to the raster scanning method, but because of the finer pitch of the shadow mask in the modern display, it will actually be a higher resolution output.
RandyT