PAL A1200 in the US?

[alenppc]

mr_a500 wrote:
Running PAL software on an NTSC Amiga with an NTSC 1084, the extreme top and bottom of the screen will be cut off. So for example, in Fire&Ice the score at the top can barely be seen and in Babeanoid the "bat" at the bottom of the screen can't be seen. This is only a problem in the few games and demos that put things on the extreme edges.

On some 1084 monitors, you can adjust the V-height and "squash" the screen so everything is seen.

This makes me wonder - is the PAL 1084 physically taller or is the screen just "squashed" to fit?

There is no problem using a PAL Amiga with an NTSC 1084-style monitor. The input is RGB so the picture will be fine you would just have to adjust the V-size controls and eventually V-sync which will make it look exactly like it would appear on a PAL 1084. The opposite is also true - if you have a PAL 1084 which you want to use with an NTSC amiga, you have to do the same but in reverse because by default a PAL 1084 monitor will centre the NTSC resolution picture leaving top and bottom black borders (like if for example you were watching a widescreen movie).

Even my old 1080 monitor (Jan 1986!) can be adjusted to view the full 625-line resolution.

As far as the PSU is concerned - there is no need to get a power converter. You can use any 110V PSU intended for use with an A500 or simply rewire any cheap PC/AT PSU, even a 100W would do perfectly fine... The only problem might be finding the square power connector.

[alenppc]

I had 3 different 1084S's as well as a 4th 1084S-P or whatever the "2nd generation" ones were, and all of them adapted to PAL mode by changing the refresh rate and I never had to adjust anything on the monitor to see the full screen.

This was with NTSC A500/A1200's, so maybe in the case of a PAL machine this may not be the case, but I don't see what the difference would be, the video signal remains the same AFAIK.

No, there is no difference when using the RGB connection. I had a PAL 1084S and an NTSC 1080, and they don't sync automatically to a different screenmode but you have to adjust them manually... not a big deal really...

The only thing is, as you are probably aware, Commodore sold lots of different models, that is to say, models that were significantly different hardware-wise and even had different connectors on the back under the same model number, which means that you can never know which behaviour to expect from one until you try it... Even two 1084s which look perfectly identical from the outside might have different specs.