STILL getting screen burn?

demogo

Well-known member

Donor 14 years: 2012-2025
Joined
Jun 30, 2007
Messages
14,951
Reaction score
2,102
Location
Texas
Maybe I'm just naive, but I was a little startled to run into one of the Galaga / Ms Pac 25th reunion? combo games in a local restaurant the other day.

Anyway, there was noticeable Ms Pac screen burn on the tube. You could see the maze walls, etc.

Why???

I realize the physics are still the same and tubes will still burn but I thought that game manufacturers were a LOT smarter now about preventing screen burn with their games.

I guess not in this case?
 
Tubes are made the same as always. Anytime a program has an image that stays in the same place all the time, then burn will happen.

And it wouldn't matter if the manufacturers are smarter now. The operator's are still dumb as hell and don't care if their games stay on 24-hours-day.....
 
Tubes are made the same as always. Anytime a program has an image that stays in the same place all the time, then burn will happen.

And it wouldn't matter if the manufacturers are smarter now. The operator's are still dumb as hell and don't care if their games stay on 24-hours-day.....

Yeah, but if you've got any brains as a programmer, you don't keep the same image on the screen for very long. Limit the attract mode, shorten the time the maze spends on the screen, there's got to be lots of creative ways to prevent or massively slow down the screen burn. Hell, move the picture up 1/4" on the screen and back down again -- there's lots of ways if you care.
 
Why would a manufacturer want to prevent screen burn?

Making monitors and games last longer doesn't generally help sell more of them...
 
Ok, let's say this programmer only has the "High Score" words showing during gameplay and gameplay attract mode (to show potential players what the game looks like while playing). let's also say that 12 people play the game in any given day at an average of 5 minutes per game, and that the gameplay attract mode when not being played only lasts 30 seconds, and there is a 30 second lapse between each run of gameplay attract mode.

So, if the game is left on 24-hours, the "High Score" words are on the screen for one hour of actual gameplay, and 11.5 hours of attract mode. That's 12.5 hours/day that those words are in that spot.

Now, multiply that by the 2 years the game has been on location and you can see where the burn-in comes from.

It'll happen on our own games even if bought new. it'll just take longer because we typically don't run them the same way, but eventually you'll see it. if you got a new monitor in that Spy Hunter of yours, eventually you'd see it on the new monitor, too....
 
The other issue is the saturation on screen. Most of us don't turn the brightness half way to laser burning your retinas out on our screens. Operators do. They want the screen to be bright and sharp on the sunniest day of the summer. So they turn it up until you see the return strokes of the electon beam and then turn it down until they see solid black. At that intensity, the beam is practically going to melt the phosphores off the inside of the tube.

That is why you get screen burn. It doesn't have to happen, but operators want to attract your eyes to the screen and if they had to put a new monitor into a box (at $100 a throw) or a new tube (at $35) once every 2 years on a machine pulling down $60 a week. You do the math. It's like everything in life, follow the money.

ken
 
The "High Score" on Ms.Pac-man is always in one spot, whether the game is being played or is in the attract mode.

The only way to effectively defeat screen burn is for the attract mode to cycle the colors/brightness by inverting so that the burn will occur equally on the screen. But doing that is not really plausible.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York
 
Back
Top Bottom