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Thread: TV service menu?

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    Default TV service menu?

    Is anyone familiar with the acronyms used in TV service menus? youd think itd be pretty straight forward. What does FAC stand for? I know R, G, B, V and H. There are like 100 different controls and most of then dont even seem to change anything when I adjust the picture.

    The problem Im having now is that the sides looks convex and the picture is too wide from right to left. There's an attribute called Hsize6 and adjusting it does nothing.

    On my Sony I was able to correct the convex shape but this one is baffling me. Its a Magnavox. Im trying to adjust as much as I can without having to physically open it up and adjust things that way

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    Peach (Level 3) fluid_matrix's Avatar
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    Is there any context? Like being used in a sentence or something?

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    Great Puma (Level 12) jb143's Avatar
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    Can you find a service manual online? All that stuff should be listed in there.

    Sometimes there's only so much you can do though and finer adjustments have to be made inside. Like by putting magnetic strips on the tube.
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    Well it turns out FAC stands for Factory. I found a service manual for a similar TV with similar parameters. The factort presets are nowhere close to what they should be for mine however. It does give me somewhat of an idea of what I am looking at though.

    This is probably a dumb question but if I adjust my TV (vertical height, centeredness, red/blue/green gain, etc.) for say, its component input, do those values stay the same for all the other inputs as well? I have to imagine the answer is yes because I really dont want to have to keep changing them every time I move back and forth.

    a follow up question to that is if I set it how I like it for one console, is it going to still be centered in the middle of the screen for another console? I never really understood that. I am sure that the answer varies by manufacturer.

    It is a Magnavox 20MS3442/17 by the way. its actually in really good shape and no picture distortion besides some slight tilt. I will have to adjust to the yoke for that.
    Last edited by gbpxl; 05-23-2020 at 06:50 PM.

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    well after painstaking correcting the tilt on my picture, it's back to having tilt issues despite the gun being epoxied in place. I'm not sure how that happened and I'm not sure if I care anymore.

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    I've found tinkering with an old TV's service menu usually gets you nowhere. The reality is the manufacturers back then didn't care about geometry going bad after 20 years or more. If it was askew after a few years, nobody cared, it rarely affected your watching of simply television as opposed to games.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
    I've found tinkering with an old TV's service menu usually gets you nowhere. The reality is the manufacturers back then didn't care about geometry going bad after 20 years or more. If it was askew after a few years, nobody cared, it rarely affected your watching of simply television as opposed to games.
    well people in general dont care that much it seems. a guy I talk to at my local game store who is a tech freak and a film buff says he stretches the picture out of Full Screen DVDs so that it fills the entire 16:9 screen. i cant imagine watching a movie that way

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    Quote Originally Posted by gbpxl View Post
    well people in general dont care that much it seems. a guy I talk to at my local game store who is a tech freak and a film buff says he stretches the picture out of Full Screen DVDs so that it fills the entire 16:9 screen. i cant imagine watching a movie that way
    Ugh...sounds like watching a move at my in-laws. And they also keep their TV on factory settings so everything looks like a soap opera.

    As far as the picture tilting again after adjusting it, I'm not sure why that would happen. I've got an old Trinitron CRT that I rigged up as an arcade monitor and it has a few geometry issues and just a bit of tilt that used to bother me some. But the only place I notice it is on startup when it shows the test grid pattern.
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    Quote Originally Posted by jb143 View Post
    Ugh...sounds like watching a move at my in-laws. And they also keep their TV on factory settings so everything looks like a soap opera.

    As far as the picture tilting again after adjusting it, I'm not sure why that would happen. I've got an old Trinitron CRT that I rigged up as an arcade monitor and it has a few geometry issues and just a bit of tilt that used to bother me some. But the only place I notice it is on startup when it shows the test grid pattern.
    I heard it had something to do with the poles of the Earth. not sure. I did move it recently, about 15 feet. I cant imagine moving it 4 hundred-thousandths of a degree north made that big of a difference. maybe I pissed off the retro gaming Gods because I wasn't playing enough

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    There could be a possibility that might mess it up, but I wouldn't think so. Generally, that's more likely to be the cause of gaussing issues.
    "Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...

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