What is Larry Pina's Test Pattern Generator?

The Test Pattern Generator (TPG) is a comprehensive diagnostics program included with the book. As a result of heat and old age and maladjusted upgrades, a large number of older computers now have shrunken video. Instead of a normal-sized display, there's a large black border all around. Instead of a well-focussed display, certain areas are fuzzy. Left untreated, the image becomes distorted, tilted, or off-center. Eventually, the display collapses to a virtical line or the set fails altogether.

Test Patter Generator helps you treat these problems. It creasted precision alignment patterns just like the dot-bar generators used in television repair.

By measuring the patterns with a ruler, you can determine what (if anything) needs to be done. Simply running the program does not fix the set! For that you slso need detaile dinstructions, alignment tools, and a multitester. Details are in the book this software came with.

Download Larry Pina's Test Pattern Generator for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 2.0 up to Mac OS 4.2

Compatibility notes

Three system disks are needed.
Two are 400K disks based on System version 2.0 (dated April 1985) for use on 128K to 512K Macs, Lisas, and Mac XL's running the old MacWorks 3.0 / MacWorks XL.
The other disk should be an 800K disk based on system version 4.2 (dated August 1987) for use on 512K Enhanced Macs, the Mac Plus, the Mac SE and upgradeds Lisas, and Max XL's (with 800K drives) running MacWorks Plus.

For general use it's very important that you use the recommended versions of the System and Finder. These have been extensively tested and are known to work properly "across the board" on all of the above models.
But for use on a specific computer (say your own machine), you can safely substitute whatever version of the System and Finder that came with it.

It's ok, for example, to use System version 3.2 on a Mac Plus but not on an original 128K Mac. That combination results in a SadMac icon with error #0F 000A.

Likewise, you can use System 2.0 on a Mac Plus, but not on a Macintosh SE Hard Disk 20. That rearranges the HFS directory on the internal hard drive.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac