Benefits of PAL Fat Agnus over NTSC??

[K7HTH]

Are there any benefits to having a PAL Fat Agnus in an A500 or having a PAL 1200 over an NTSC 1200 for games and other applications?

[TjLaZer]

Other than having PAL as default when loading games, No there is no benefit, as NTSC Amigas (with Fat Agnus or higher) can switch to PAL mode and run all PAL games.

[Matt_H]

It's probably better to have PAL as the default, since I've found many NTSC games will work happily in PAL, whereas very few PAL games will work in NTSC.


EDIT:
Of course, this becomes an issue if you're using a typical television and not a 15KHz monitor as a display device.

[leirbag28]

Personally I prefer NTSC....especially if your in USA......and also the speed increase..........many games run faster in NTSC mode if they were originally PAL, but unfortunately this causes Glitches on some games (constantly saw this on C=64 games)

Plus I live anything to do with the Amiga and Video and Large Video displays.......so its gotta be NTSC for me. If you have a Large Philips TV then you may be good with PAL as many PHILIPS TVs supposrt PAL in color an shrink the screen automatically to fit the image!  I love it!.....well you know.they did manufacture the 1084 for Commodore :-) as well as parts of the FMV card IIRC :-)

[SamuraiCrow]

NTSC works fine in the US, Japan, and Canada but in Germany they use a SECAM standard with the same scan rates as PAL.  In Germany, therefore, you'd be better off with PAL.

[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!

:-)

[x56h34]

Hyperspeed put things in perspective very nicely.

The same happened to C64. You would miss out on a lot of great games and demos if your C64 was NTSC.

With Amiga, things are a little easier to work around with, as if you have 1MB chip ram, you can switch to your required refresh rate (e.g. 50 or 60 hz).

[K7HTH]

So I take it if one has a PAL Amiga from the UK or Germany it only affects users of NTSC regarding the composite output of these systems and not the RGB-out video?

[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.

:-)

[Waccoon]

The big problem is that with newer Amigas (like the 1200), you can switch between PAL/NTSC in the early boot menu, but the switch is "forgotten" if you're booting a game with a non-dos boot sector.  If you have an NTSC machine, you'll have to use a boot loader like Degrader to change the system mode...

...or just use WinUAE for running old games.  

[adolescent]

@Hyperspeed

You can easily add a PAL/NTSC switch to most Amigas (big box models have pin headers for the change, others require an agnus pin to be cut and switched).  I had one on my A500.  Wiring this up is easier than the Saturn mod (SPST switch versus DPDT).