NTSC Carts on a PAL System

[Paul Slocum]

For people who have a PAL Atari and TV, do NTSC cartridges work on your PAL system?

 

-Paul

[Osmeroid]

Yes, usually no problem except that some of the colours get changed, sometimes even that change is limited. About 20 of my collection are NTSC carts & all work fine.

[MattyXB]

Yes, work great. Some flicker on my Atari Jr. (maybe the Jr. is a bit defect). On the Atari 7800 they work great, maybe I must test other consoles.

 

And the color changed but you can play.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

They didn't work directly with my TV (72cm Sony Triniton), but through the tuner of a VCR they work perfect.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

@Paul:

There are two things to take care of, if you want to make sure that your NTSC program can work on a PAL system. Make sure that you are generating an even number of scanlines in all frames, and also make sure that you have exactly three lines of uninterrupted VSYNC (i.e. don't access the TIA or RIOT except for the three WSYNCs).

 

Up until recently I was using an old Sharp PAL TV which would loose all the colour information, if you did frames with odd numbers of scanlines. It was able to sync to most NTSC games, but some of them were problematical. I'm not quite sure what caused these problems, but there were demos from the Stella list which only added a STA TIM64T during the VSYNC phase, and they would roll the screen.

 

Eventually I was able to adjust the VHOLD knob on my TV in such a way, that it would sync to all NTSC games as well as the normal PAL TV broadcast. Some of the NTSC games that had caused problems on it (Indy 500, Desert Falcon) also seem to roll the screen on some NTSC TVs, as previous discussions here indicate. So it might not be a PAL only problem. The PAL version of these games always worked fine though.

 

Now I'm using a multi-standard TV from Aiwa. It has a special PAL60 mode, so all NTSC games work nicely with it. Also It doesn't loose the colour when games do an odd number of scanlines per frame. Instead it sometimes shows the top part of the screen in totally different colours than normally.

 

The palette between PAL and NTSC is very different. If colours matter for your program, you can try it out with an emulator. In z26 you would start your program like: "z26 -c1 synth.bin". The colours in the emulator are a bit too washed out, but you could get a basic impression.

 

@ ZANZA:

The carrier frequency for the sound is different between most versions of PAL and NTSC, so it's perfectly normal that you won't get sound when connecting a NTSC console to a PAL TV. The sound carrier frequency is different between different versions of PAL as well BTW, so you wouldn't get sound, if you connected a British PAL console to a German PAL TV for example.

 

The carrier frequncy for the colour signal is different between NTSC and PAL too. So your NTSC console might not produce any colours either.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[zanza]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ekhardt:

The carrier frequency for the sound is different between most versions of PAL and NTSC, so it's perfectly normal that you won't get sound when connecting a NTSC console to a PAL TV.

---

 

Yes but my TV produces the images in color (I think it can display NTSC signal ?..)

I will try through my VCR which seems to play VHS NTSC tapes)

 

How could I modify the signal carrier to produce sounds ?? resistors /condensers /transistors to change whatsoever ??

[King Atari]

Ah, you have given me an opportunity to rant about PAL games on an NTSC TV. But, you're all sick of hearing about it, so I won't.

[Paul Slocum]

If you guys don't mind, tell me what kind of TV your using too.

 

The reason I'm asking about this is that I've started selling the first Synthcarts, and some people who don't have any NTSC carts but have PAL setups have been wondering if it will work on their system. Thanks for your help.

 

-Paul

[Albert]

Hi Paul,

 

I have access to several PAL televisions right now at work since I'm working on a PAL PS2 game at the moment. I can bring a 2600 and Synthcart into work and try it out to see how the Synthcart looks on the PAL sets.

 

..Al

 

[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Albert ]

[zanza]

For me it works on a Toshiba 70cm, Daewoo 51cm and even on the Tuner Card of my PowerMacintosh

[zanza]

quote:

---

originally posted by Albert:

I have access to several PAL televisions right now at work ....

---

 

Albert because of this you can maybe tell me some stuff....

I have receive a Coleco Gemini from USA so it's an NTSC model and I was wondering because it's my first NTSC model, why I have no sound at all that comes out from it.

 

Do you ever encounter the problem when connecting a NTSC console to a PAL TV ??

 

So if not I will know for sure that my Gemini has definitely a problem before dismantling it and then maybe have any chance to find what's wrong with it .

 

II'm slightly angry because I love this console and never succeed to use it since I own it (controllers are so excellent compared to the original Atari IMHO)

[Paul Slocum]

The Synthcart does have a consistent 262 scanlines, but I do a STA TIM64T during the third VSYNC. I've run my program in PCAEWin on PAL colors, and the difference is barely noticable since it's mostly text.

 

I may go ahead and make a version with the correct number of PAL scanlines. The reason I've been hesitant is that it significantly changes the tempo values.

 

Thanks to everyone for all the great information.

 

-Paul

 

[ 03-10-2002: Message edited by: Smart Patrol ]