Building a monitor tester?

I was at my Real Job last night and all of a sudden something dawned on
me. Couldn't someone take an old, cheap laptop computer and make a
universal arcade monitor tester out of it?

The raster side should be easy enough, just get the machine to get the
sync speeds right. For most arcade monitors you could use a computer
CGA mode.

As for vector monitors, the scanning could possibly be done by recording
a test pattern from an actual video game USING THE SOUND CARD of the
computer. Then edit the resulting wave file into a loop. When played
back the card SHOULD (in theory anyway) reproduce the test pattern.

There are some gotchas involved, though.
    1) Sound board input and output must be DC coupled or the result
will have some
        interesting distortions.
    2) No decent way to handle video (Z channel). This could
eventually be added,
        but in simple example above it won't exist.

But on the plus side at least the volume control on the computer can be
used to adjust picture size. Granted, a small plus side, but I'll take
any plusses I can get.

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Received on Tue Feb 27 15:00:09 2001