yeah, it works (pretty great)

TESTING THE VGA VIDEO MIXER

PART 1: Initial Testing

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So after hooking everything up, and checking everything worked, I had, I guess, a pretty big issue.

There was some kind of feedback whenever I opened up the menus for the VGA/AV converters, but this promptly faded away whenever the menus disappeared. It didn’t matter what you did with the RGB controls after that. The colours would slightly change. but there was no crazy feedback as I expected.

I had to do some digging online and found that it seems the converters don’t really just create feedback as is, you have to tweak with the settings of the converters first (namely, the brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc.).

So I did just that, really cranking up these values on both converters, and trying to dial in just the right amount.

And then, just like that, I GOT IT. Crazy ass feedback.

PART 2: Playing Around

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Safe to say, it was just as I’d dreamed. I had finally tapped into the visions I was longing to find.

I got a lot of really great stuff straight away, almost without any effort. however, I just had to test out where I could really go with this “preset” I’d found. Here are some neat tricks I discovered to find different textures and to dive deeper into it:

• Using the zoom feature on the video-VGA converter means that you can, well, zoom in to the visual. It’s an obvious one, but still, the level of detail you can get from this is insane. The more you zoom in, the more the tiny, previously unseen textures start to come into focus. It’s pretty wild. Also the feedback and the shapes themselves start to take on a more fluid quality. At times appearing like ripples, waves, and eddys, or even taking on the nebulous apparitions of clouds. And all of this encompassed into a psychedelic colourscape

• By changing the “region” on the Video-VGA converter, you can also create very different visual landscapes. There’s one setting called “PAL NC” which creates these really cool vertical lines. My personal favourite ended up being the “NTSC M”, just because the textures were so diverse, you didn’t really need to do many changes after that to get great stuff.

• Playing around with the RGB settings themselves can create amazing combinations. Particularly, whenever the Green knob gets turned high enough, these black/white vertical lines appear in the feedback, which contrast pretty heavily with the otherwise quite blurred and borderless colours and textures seen elsewhere.

• Lower RGB values are of course much darker, and higher values much brighter.

There’s so much more I could go into here, but I really feel that just the experience of watching or even playing this itself does it enough justice, it’s hard to really put it into words. So here’s a last example:

After all that fun, I decided to call this device the “RGB Colourscope”, as I think it’s a little easier to say than “no input VGA video Mixer”.