MiniMig NTSC

[alenppc]

Crom00 wrote:
Another quirk here is that games that are pal only wont work with the NTSC jumper set.

Well, this is not a bug - this matches the behaviour of the real Amiga as well. For instance, I have a few NTSC-only Amigas which cannot be switched to PAL, and won't play PAL games correctly (or at all).

[alenppc]

alexh wrote:
No, but once we have ECS no-one will care. They will all run PAL with the ability to switch to 60Hz in software.

Yeah, although it would be nice to find a way of scaling down 50Hz games to a 60Hz screen, in order to run all of the PAL games one normally cannot run when using a regular TV set (not talking about 1084 monitors etc).

How does this work on modern consoles? Unlike their retail counterparts, the Playstation/Xbox developement kit systems allow a PAL/NTSC software switch, so the game is always scaled up/down to a different resolution without having to rewrite the software, without any artifacts (like those you get when resizing an image through DPaint, for instance).
How do they achieve this?

I'm pretty sure it's impossible to do with the Amiga implementation, but if anyone knows how other systems cope with this, that would be nice to know. :-)

[alenppc]

alexh wrote:

alenppc wrote:
How does this work on modern consoles? Unlike their retail counterparts, the Playstation/Xbox developement kit systems allow a PAL/NTSC software switch

The retail versions support PAL/NTSC software switch if hacked ;-)

Yeah, but I don't feel like soldering inside my PS2. ;-)

And as far as the PS3 goes, you can't even do it, which is a shame - I've got loads of region free PAL DVDs which the stupid thing won't play so I have to rely on my old crappy 480p DVD player which does scale them down (albeit with some conversion artifacts).

Not true. Games written for 576@50Hz, but  run at 480@60Hz loose the bottom of picture. They are either written with black borders in PAL, or re-coded for NTSC.

Usually they are coded for 480@60Hz and just left with black borders at 576@50Hz

Since I am a videogames translator, I was talking about games that I get to work with - usually those are pre-release debug versions and from my experience they run indipendently on any console be it PAL or NTSC - the picture always looks the same, just a little bit crispier if running on a PAL console (with a multisystem TV, of course).

So I always wondered how they did it. There were no black borders or parts of the picture cutoff like with the Amiga. So I guess from what you're saying is that in this case the software probably has some code to deal with it, and it's not done hardware-wise as I always assumed. Hmm.

With ECS you can switch from 576@50 to 480@60 but you'll loose the bottom of the picture, and some games coded specifically for 50Hz will screw up.

Yeah, I was aware of that. Some of the best games on the Amiga, in fact, were PAL-only and won't run on NTSC Amigas at all. Which is why I wrote all that stuff in the first place.  :lol:

[alenppc]

alexh wrote:

Cant you use a linux software DVD player on PS3?

Yeah, of course, but that's not the point. :-) I would love to be able to reflash it with a debug kit firmware, that'd be awesome...