NEStinymachines

The calibration cart

One cartridge of our own, and every screen on it is built to be measured. We read it off a real console through the scope, the grabber and a camera, and off the model through the same decoder, with one tool reading all of them. Every screen carries a strip with its own name and frame number drawn into the picture, so a capture always says which screen and which frame it is.

The ROM and its manifest are served here: cal.nes and cal.json, the same bytes the checksums in the build tutorial name.

The plan, the build, the screens and the boards

  • Planning the calibration cartridge: One cartridge whose every screen is built to be measured off the real console and the model through the same reader, each frame naming itself; colour, resolution, filtering and the pad.
  • Building the calibration cart: From the idea of a frame that names itself, through a cartridge written with a sixty-line assembler, to the ROM in the model, its checksums, and the cartridge in a console.
  • The calibration screens: The cartridge's screens as our own decoder sees them, the strip that names each frame, and what each screen is for; the grabber's frames join them once the cart is in a console.
  • The blank boards and the programmer: Photographed and read: which board takes the calibration ROM's two chips, what the EPROM adapter is for, and what is still not known.
  • The build, as it goes: The cartridge being made, one measured step at a time: the programmer on the bench, each chip written and read back whole, the board's jumpers read off both sides, the parts it takes, and what is still open.