NTSC / PAL question

[x56h34]

If his Amiga is able to go to 60Hz display and get the PAL60 mode, then yes. Pretty much any Amiga should be able to run PAL or NTSC software providing that you have a way of switching it to 50hz or 60hz modes. In the early days this was possible only through hardware hacks, or if the particular game is both PAL and NTSC tolerant, but kickstart 3.0 introduced a software switch in the early-boot-menu which made the problem seemingly go away. I say seemingly because an Amiga with kickstart 3.1 CAN switch easily to appropriate display mode, but lacks compatibility. It won't run almost anything pre 3.0 due to lack of kickstart 1.3 compatibility, which a lot of old games require, thus if he's planning to use it on his PAL A500 he would need some sort of a hardware hack anyways, or a solution in a software patch on a DD floppy disk. However, it may be so that that particular piece of software was coded for PAL in mind (majority of Amiga software was) and that HE actually would be the one that will run the game properly for the first time ever, since your 60hz NTSC display was always playing the sound a bit too fast and display was overstreched on the screen due to lack of resolution that PAL requires. :-) I say this because in total, very few games were NTSC specifically coded.

Sorry if I confused you a little bit.

[x56h34]

@98PaceCar

With big box Amigas (at least with A3000 and A4000, not sure about A2000) there is an internal jumper for PAL/NTSC which you are referring to, which was used to determine 50 or 60 Hz for display. You see, these Amigas do not have built-in TV tuners like A500/A600/A1200 (well, A500 either doesn't either but it falls into this category anyways) and as such they were never made with specific NTSC or PAL chipsets for those tuners but were shipped as one type all over the world and they only requred the flip of the jumper from PAL or NTSC depending on territory, and of course an appropriate 110v or 220v PSU in their cases.

@Kronos

My nick is stupid? Perhaps. I changed it many times after using normal nicknames just to find out that there were like a million other people using it, so random numbers and letter should do this time. ;-)

As for your other point, well NTSC countries actually have the problem more so than PAL as like I've said majority of stuff is PAL specific and as PAL comes with higher resolution that NTSC, you will run into trouble running PAL games on NTSC Amigas as your display will miss the bottom of the screen and play the game faster than it should. What was coded for 25FPS/50Hz will now become 30FPS/60Hz and that WILL let you probably play the game, but will it play (gameplay wise) as it was indended by the developers? Hell no.

You being in Germany simply never had a reason to deal with PAL stuff on NTSC machines and I doubt that you ever ran into an NTSC specific coded game (name one, I'm not sure it even exists on Amiga that does not have a PAL coded equivalent).

Now, what you are saying about running NTSC coded game on PAL machine is true in a sense that you will get a black bottom part, but the 30FPS/60hz intended game will slow down to 25FPS/50hz. It will run, but not the way coders intended it to. Gameplay will be affected.

[x56h34]

@98PaceCar:

Oh and as for WHDLoad...it's a gift from gods as far as "everything will run on one Amiga" goes. :-) Almost all the good stuff is suported.

@Matt_h:

Degrader is a very good solution as well, indeed. Do you need 1MB Agnus or a whole 1MB Chip RAM too?