DCE Flicker Magic Scan Doubler Problem :(

[alexh]

I cannot believe what BAD advice you've been given.

You already had the DCE Flicker Magic Scandoubler... all you needed to do was switch the Amiga into (60Hz) NTSC mode and it would have worked fine with your Dell LCD monitor.

If you had KS3.1 all you had to do was hold down both mouse buttons on powerup / reset (to enter the early startup menu) and press space!

You may have had to fiddle around with Workbench screen prefs and WHDload icon tool-types before everything was  set to run at 60Hz but it would have been free... no more hardware purchases required, no hacking / soldering etc.

I cannot believe that no one explained this to you.

[alexh]

Yes, it's really that simple.

Sell your old DCE flicker magic on ebay in the next few days (remember to post worldwide for the best price) and hope that someone out there has not heard of Jen's Schoenfelds new Indivision 1200 (or wants a flicker magic for an A4000) and you should get your money back.

The Indivision 1200 should be a lot better than the flicker magic. It's 24-bit instead of 16-bit. Reportadly works with more screen modes. It has scan rate conversion 50-60Hz, but I wouldn't recommend using a 50Hz mode all the time... the conversion will almost certainly suck ass for games and demos which scroll so switching everything to 60Hz will make everything look better.

[alexh]

Of course it depends on what colours are used as to how bad the overall effect of using a 16-bit scandoubler looks.

It looses the least significant bits (LSB's) of the RGB digital signals and so subtly different colour changes are lost and merge into one solid colour.

[alexh]

12-bit.

I thought everyone knew the (non AGA) Amiga had 4096 colours (2^12)?

[alexh]

You are correct. No distortion of colour in ECS/OCS mode with a 16-bit INTERNAL scandoubler like the DCE Flicker Magic.

[alexh]

Do you have a hard drive? If so you can change your workbench->prefs->ScreenMode to NTSC 60Hz so it will always boot up without having to use the early startup sequence.

NOTE: If NTSC does not appear in your list of ScreenModes then you will have to move the NTSC monitor settings from workbench->storage->monitors to workbench->devs->monitors

If you use WHDload you'll be able to change the tooltype for each game ICON (or once in the global prefs) to include NTSC (get rid of PAL if it is already there) and they will all start and run in 60Hz and thus be compatible with your monitor.

If you dont have a hard drive, and you use floppy disks... you're a bit screwed. You should invest in one (or an internal IDE->CF adapter and a CF card).

As for the vertical lines... have you tried changing the Pixel Clock & Phase settings using the menu on your monitor? Try Auto Adjust first.