2600/7800 compatibility of Decathlon in PAL

[Fretwobbler]

I was passing the time by reading the 2600 FAQ and came accross the section regarding compatibility of games between 26/7800.

 

It says certain games dont work on NTSC 7800's but PAL 7800's dont seem to be affected.

 

I normally only have a 7800 hooked up to the TV these days and prior to reading this article I was naively unaware of any compatibility issues, so upon reading this I dived into a chest of carts feverishly searching out the broken Decathlon that was purchased on e-bay a month ago. Hooked up a 6 switch woody and BAM!, I'm a happy man with a working Decathlon.

 

When the cart first arrived in the post I just thought the seller on ebay had stung me with a NTSC cart because the screen rolled in the way that some carts do on the wrong standard TV and so just stuck it in the trunk thinking the box looks nice and forgot about it.

 

Both the 2600 and 7800 must be PAL otherwise I'd have made an insurance claim due to fire damage by now.

 

I'm cant be 100% sure of the cart is PAL but the instructions are in English and German. The cart box was made in W-Germany with no country of origin on the actual cart. The cart serial is AZ-030. The 7800 serial is X 9383820303 made in CHina.

 

This leads me to think there are compatibility problems in PAL systems so Ive checked the others on the list that I can.

 

Robot Tank also doesn't work in the 7800 however the screen doesn't roll. When switched on you get a black and white image with a black stripe about 1" wide running down the far left side of the screen. again I have no idea if the cart is PAL or NTSC as I have no manual or box for this.

 

Space shuttle doesn't work either - when in the 7800 the screen appears, all the colours are right but whenever a button is pressed or the joystick moves nothing happens as it should, its just fixed on the screen that appears when first switched on.

 

I cannot check Supercharger as I dont own it.

 

Adam

[+Mitch]

I believe that the FAQ may be wrong on this point. I seem to remember Eckhard posting previously that the PAL 7800 had the same compatiblity problems as the NTSC version. However, on some of the problem Activision games the code was slightly rewritten to use a different bank-switching method that was compatible with the 7800.

 

Mitch

http://atari7800.atari.org

[Eckhard Stolberg]

This is correct. The PAL 7800 has compatibility isues with certain Activision games as well. Just like with the NTSC 7800 you can fix this by removing a certain capacitor from the 7800. But then you might get problems with some of Atari's 2600 games. Personally I haven't had any problems after the modification, but others have reported difficulties getting some of the Superchip-RAM games to work.

 

And it's also true that Activision must have changed the problematical games to a different bankswitching format. I have a HES copy of PAL Decathlon which works nicely on my 7800, because it has been changed to Atari's 16K bankswitching format. Also the NTSC ROM for Space Shuttle clearly uses Atari's 8K bankswitching format, while my PAL copy doesn't work on my 7800, because it uses Activision's own 8K bankswitching format.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg