Pal

[yllawwally]

What things are different in a game for PAL? The game I'm working on is NTSC. What would I need to do differently to make it PAL compatible?

[+SpiceWare]

The simplest is to create a PAL60 game by only changing the colors.

 

More complex is to also change the scan line count, to achieve PAL's 50 frames per second, and to implement fractional positioning (if you haven't already) so that the game plays at the same rate it does now. If you change the scan lines w/out the fractional positioning then the game will be slower when played on a PAL system.

 

There's some info about it at my site on this page: Atari NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM

[yllawwally]

Thanks for the info SpiceWare. That's exactly what I was looking at. I'm not using fractional positioning. I'm not sure I can free up that much extra RAM, I would need 17 more bytes of data. Do most people just leave the extra lines blank, if it was originally for NTSC? Twenty percent more screen space, is quite significant.

[yllawwally]

Is PAL and Secam the same? Just different colors?

[+SpiceWare]

I think most people leave the extra lines blank when going from NTSC -> PAL. The hassle of Fractional Positioning is part of why it's common to leave the PAL version running at NTSC's 60 frames per seconds instead of converting to PAL's 50 frames per second. When you see PAL60 that means PAL colors with NTSC timing.

 

Yep timing for PAL and SECAM are the same, only the colors are different.