Author Topic: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?  (Read 4878 times)

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Offline tkamiyaTopic starter

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I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« on: August 19, 2018, 10:03:44 pm »
I used to see these all the time back in my time in Japan - around 70s and 80s.  This particular piece of equipment look like an oscilloscope with oversized display with too few buttons.  There is an input for X and Y, and Z typically in back of it.  It basically functions identically to any scope in XY mode.  Except this is A LOT bigger.  Feed an X and an Y voltage and dot at the center moves to whatever X and Y represents.

Does anyone know what this is called?

It's not a vector scope.
It's really not a raster scope.
XY scope didn't find much.

 

Offline DC1MC

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Offline tkamiyaTopic starter

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2018, 10:15:17 pm »
Yes.  That one, I found....  but I recall these things were all over the place.  How can I search for them?  Is there a generic name?
 

Offline elecman14

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2018, 10:25:42 pm »
I would look for "XY Display". This link has a small list of them: http://vectorvga.com/PDFs/XY_Displays.pdf
 

Offline DC1MC

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2018, 10:29:48 pm »
Not really, I used to find them searching for waveform monitor and vectorscope on fleabay.
 

Online Andy Watson

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2018, 10:45:21 pm »
Were they associated with Radar ? Perhaps a PPI display ?
 

Online The Soulman

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2018, 11:13:59 pm »
I should have known the name,but I forgot..  :palm:
 

Offline Alex Eisenhut

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Hoarder of 8-bit Commodore relics and 1960s Tektronix 500-series stuff. Unconventional interior decorator.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #8 on: August 20, 2018, 01:48:30 am »
I used to see these all the time back in my time in Japan - around 70s and 80s.  This particular piece of equipment look like an oscilloscope with oversized display with too few buttons.  There is an input for X and Y, and Z typically in back of it.  It basically functions identically to any scope in XY mode.  Except this is A LOT bigger.  Feed an X and an Y voltage and dot at the center moves to whatever X and Y represents.

Does anyone know what this is called?

It's not a vector scope.
It's really not a raster scope.
XY scope didn't find much.

When I worked at a TV studio, we had a few of these which were called "vector displays", as distinct from
"Vector scopes", because they didn't have the decoding circuitry, but needed to obtain x & y signals from some other device (often a picture monitor).
The audio guys used the same device (but with a different graticule), to check stereo phase.
These ones had quite a small display, but I have seen the bigger ones on a few occasions
 

Offline james_s

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #9 on: August 20, 2018, 03:21:13 am »
Vector monitor is the correct term, or X-Y display. A number of classic arcade games used vector monitors too, Atari called them Quadrascan.
 

Online The Soulman

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #10 on: August 20, 2018, 08:29:04 am »
The audio guys used the same device (but with a different graticule), to check stereo phase.

Yes, and they had a specific name.   :-//
 

Offline tv84

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #11 on: August 20, 2018, 03:09:16 pm »
The audio guys used the same device (but with a different graticule), to check stereo phase.

Yes, and they had a specific name.   :-//

Phasescope.

 

Offline woodchips

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #12 on: August 20, 2018, 06:30:18 pm »
Try Kikusui 5121A alignment scope, that is the one I have. About 10KHz bandwidth, if you want a real one look for an HP143A, 20MHz.
 

Offline tkamiyaTopic starter

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #13 on: August 21, 2018, 05:21:22 pm »
Seems what I am looking for is becoming very rare and hard to get.  I can see vector scopes everywhere but looking at its input, it does not seem to do what I wantl

What I really want to do is to render an image from HP8568/HP8566 and HP85662A on a larger screen.  Aforementioned setup has X, Y, Z, and BLANK output.  Most oscilloscopes lack BLANK, it seems.  None of mine has it.  I even thought of buying a new scope just to use it as a XYZB to VGA converter, but that doesn't seem to be a good fit either.  I have never done FPGA so that's not a viable route. 

Seems vector type anything is popular among vintage video game cloud.  Maybe they got'em all? 

HOW ELSE can I get this done??  Maybe go all the way IN and replace this CRT with VGA in 85662 and tap the output?  That'll be about $700.  Ouch.
 

Offline woodchips

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #14 on: August 21, 2018, 05:52:06 pm »
All analogue scopes have a blank, or brightup, input. No idea about digital, don't use them.

As I said, you need an HP143A. The 8566 etc need about 5MHz bandwidth to paint the XY display.

Try for a 7603, or the equivalent HP scope, 182? They have a larger screen.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #15 on: August 21, 2018, 07:34:47 pm »
Seems what I am looking for is becoming very rare and hard to get.  I can see vector scopes everywhere but looking at its input, it does not seem to do what I wantl

What I really want to do is to render an image from HP8568/HP8566 and HP85662A on a larger screen.  Aforementioned setup has X, Y, Z, and BLANK output.  Most oscilloscopes lack BLANK, it seems.  None of mine has it.  I even thought of buying a new scope just to use it as a XYZB to VGA converter, but that doesn't seem to be a good fit either.  I have never done FPGA so that's not a viable route. 

Seems vector type anything is popular among vintage video game cloud.  Maybe they got'em all? 

HOW ELSE can I get this done??  Maybe go all the way IN and replace this CRT with VGA in 85662 and tap the output?  That'll be about $700.  Ouch.


The vector monitors used in video games have magnetic deflection and use standard CRTs, the same type used in TVs. They are generally not fast enough to work with a signal intended to drive an electrostatic CRT. Large screen electrostatic deflection vector monitors are just an incredibly specialized item that was never produced in large numbers. There are vector to VGA conversion devices that *might* cut it, or many digital scopes have a VGA monitor output however the XY mode on most digital scopes is next to useless.

You might try pointing a video camera at the screen you want to capture, it's possible that it will flicker badly and look horrible but it may end up being passable depending on the scan rates. If it does produce reasonable results then you could get a scope camera mount for your instrument and fabricate something to attach a video camera instead of the original film camera. Once you have a standard video image you can send it to any kind of modern monitor you want.
 

Offline AutogolazzoJr

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #16 on: August 22, 2018, 06:24:57 pm »
It's a vector monitor. The ones from video games are very similar to the raster monitors, but they have coils with lower inductance.
They are pretty cool:
 

Offline tkamiyaTopic starter

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #17 on: August 22, 2018, 07:01:36 pm »
That's VERY nice!! 

Yes, I remember from my childhood, most games used vector displays.  It would be very nice if this can be done with LCD but more I think about it, harder it gets.  It would require fast DAC and a bank of dual port memory.  Write from one side and read from the other.  Too bad there isn't a cheap module like going the other way around.
 

Offline tkamiyaTopic starter

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #18 on: August 22, 2018, 09:12:12 pm »
MONITOR SCOPE was the word I was looking for!

Of course it didn't help me find it on eBay. 
 

Offline james_s

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Re: I don't know what this is called.... XY scope?
« Reply #19 on: August 22, 2018, 10:11:09 pm »
It was never most games, only a small fraction were vector games, but some like Tempest and Asteroids were enormously popular.

The same graphics can today be drawn on an LCD monitor but to convert from vector to raster means capturing the signal at high speed and using it to draw a framebuffer.
 


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