PAL Standards and NTSC TV's

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Tempest,

 

that depends on what you are talking about here. PAL is just a way of encoding the colour information into an existing B/W TV signal. It has been applied to many different B/W signals, so there are many different versions of PAL.

 

If you are talking about PAL consoles, those won't work properly on NTSC TVs. Your TV won't be able to decode the colour information properly and therefore only show a B/W picture.

 

If you are talking about VCS cartridges here, you might have more luck. The European versions of PAL all use a higher resolution and a lower framerate than NTSC. For the VCS this information is in the cartridges, which is why most PAL games roll on an NTSC TV.

 

However, PAL colour encoding was also applied to some South Amarican TV standards. I think the Brazilian TV standard is actually working with the NTSC resolution and framerate. Atari's cheap solution to this was to hack the NTSC consoles a bit and just release the NTSC games over there. I'm not sure if they bothered to change the colours in the games too, though. But for you this would mean that Brazilian (pirate) VCS games would probably not roll on your TV and might also show proper colours.

 

I think CCE is a Brazilian company, this might be why the game is working for you.

 

BTW since Tempest is so close to the 1000 posts barrier, does anyone want to guess what is going to happen when he crosses it? My guess is that Alex and Albert will just send him their bills for the exceeded transfer limit, as he is obviously responsible for most of it.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Tempest]

quote

BTW since Tempest is so close to the 1000 posts barrier, does anyone want to guess what is going to happen when he crosses it? My guess is that Alex and Albert will just send him their bills for the exceeded transfer limit, as he is obviously responsible for most of it  

 

I hope not. I only surf the AtariAge site 19 to 20 hours a day. I wouldn't call that excessive.

 

I was talking about VCS cartridges. So you think that Brazilian carts should work on a NTSC 2600 console with funny colors right? Hmm... That opens up a whole new market to me.

 

I'm not sure if the colors on Mr. Postman are screwed up or not, it's an odd game to begin with and I don't have a PAL one to compare it to.

 

Tempest

[videotwit]

Lets see if I remember this correctly...

 

Brazilian carts are PAL-M (is that right?), which is more similar to NTSC than European PAL standards.

 

Basically it means that most Brazilian carts will work fine on an NTSC VCS / TV setup. I know all of mine do.

[Tempest]

I've read that there are different kinds of PAL formats, and some will actually appear to work on NTSC TV's. Does anyone know what Countries use what type of PAL standard and which ones work on NTSC TV's? Does this make any sense? Am I totally insane?

 

BTW, I have CCE Mr. Postman Cart that appears to be NTSC (at least it works on my TV). I thought all CCE carts were PAL, where could this one have come from? Could it be one of those different PAL standards I was talking about?

 

Tempest

[jahfish]

the best thing to do is to get a VCR or TV that just supports all those modes (ntsc-pal-secam), they're not expensive ....

 

and they give you the full flavour of the 2600

 

that's how i solved the problem.

[jahfish]

there's also converters for 20-50$ that you can use to have the right mode on your screen.... just ask in a videogame store ...