Benefits of PAL Fat Agnus over NTSC??

[Hyperspeed]

The main advantage of PAL is that the Amiga's creative base became
Europe. This is where all the demo scene party gatherings happened,
the European software houses churned out games - a lot of which didn't
make it to the US.

So for demos and quite a few games/apps that weren't retargettable it
would be an advantage.

However in '97 I switched all my software to 60Hz PAL so as to
appreciate the full speed, full refresh that Leirbag28 talks of. I'll
now try to get my hands on American Amiga games if they are not
retargettable.

When it comes to video editing though, you definately want to take
advantage of the Amiga's 15Khz native video in your own region. This
is why so many European owners lost out when they couldn't appreciate
the NTSC-only Video Toaster effects board.

:-(

But...  Hah! We got our own back by having the TV-in card for the
Picasso-IV. I bet that wasn't made in NTSC, or at least in very scarce
numbers!

:-)

[Hyperspeed]

That's one side of it...

Regardless of PAL/NTSC coming from the RF or Composite ports you will
get crisp 'fresh from the chips' display on the RGB video port.

However, the video port outputs the display of the custom chips so if
they are playing a PAL game then the RGB port will be outputting 50Hz
horizontal refresh unless you use the Early Boot Menu on your American
machine.

PAL/NTSC are just colour transmission methods as far as I know, but
the standards also include descriptions for the vertical/horizontal
refresh just as a graphics card outputs 31Khz SVGA standard.

I remember a friend of mine used to have a box full of dodgy pirate
games and a lot would have a Fairlight intro which allowed you to use
the spacebar to toggle which screenmode the game would boot in. I saw
a similar boot selector for Wipeout 3 on Playstation.

Luckily the Amiga engineers had the foresight to include this Early
Boot Menu and also the Overscan Prefs in Workbench. A lot of latter
Playstation games had a Overscan prefs routine in their game options
in case your TV didn't have resizing buttons.

What would be handy for Amiga owners is a hardware dongle just like
they fitted to the Sega Saturn in 1997. Just a simple silver dongle
which with a quick flick swaps between territory and thus full
compatibility with all regions without needing a boot disk or constant
settings editing.

I don't see why it can't be done - maybe the switch could be one of
those blank keys on the keyboard! There is a resistor on the
motherboard that dictates what region the Amigas are.

:-)