Welcome to the NES NTSC signal visualizer. The waveform of a video frame produced by an NES is currently downloading. Once complete, the waveform will be decompressed and decoded, ready to be rendered the moment the start button is pressed below.

To the right is a preview of the visualizer. The top portion of the screen is dedicated to the rendered frame which has been decoded from the signal waveform. The highlighted pixels align to the signal presented in the plot below, while those not currently visible are de-emphasized. The pixel focus can be broadened or narrowed with the mouse wheel and translated by clicking and dragged with a mouse to quickly find areas of interest in the signal.

Immediately below the rendered frame is the pixel ribbon. This contains the same pixel information as the rendered frame, however, these pixels are presented in correlation to the signal. That is, every pixel presented in the ribbon is decoded from the signal directly below it in the plot. The pixel ribbon supports zooming and panning as well.

Finally, at the bottom, is the signal plot. This signal represents a single NTSC frame captured from the output of an NES playing the game Super Mario Bros. The signal is sampled at a rate of 250MSa/s, meaning a single frame consists of around 4 million data points. With this in mind, the plotter was designed specifically to handle large numbers of data points quickly and efficiently.

Questions or comments? Feel free to contact tanner@imaginarygarage.com