MiniMig NTSC

[Crom00]

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

RobocodII for example.

Also notice that team 17 and bitmap brothers games don;t always work on the MiniMIG. Of course most of their games are my favs...
[

[freqmax]

yaqube wrote:
Unfortunately I don't have the source code of the released version since it was a work in progress. I have almost finished the implementation of the full ECS chipset. I will release it soon with all the sources.

I think our FPGA hackers don't mind a source code snapshot of a work in progress. It can be fixed up to work. But a .bin is something that's hard to make use of.

[Elwood]

@yaqube

Check your PM please...

[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).

[freqmax]

This could be something that Minimig maybe can be configured to handle ..?, ie playing NTSC games on PAL and vice versa with some hybrid mode?

[alexh]

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

[Namek]

So good, I have tested this on my Minimig and it works very good, NTSC and PAL and Vertical and Horizontal interpolation, but I like the new transparent menu.  :-P

[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. :-)

[alexh]

alenppc wrote:
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).

Scaling down? You mean scale down the extra lines that PAL screens have rather than loose the bottom of the picture? Not really possible without introducing black borders. It would contort the aspect ratio.

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 ;-)

alenppc wrote:
so the game is always scaled up/down to a different resolution without having to rewrite the software

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

alenppc wrote:
How do they achieve this?

They don't.

alenppc wrote:
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. :-)

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. Modern games consoles cannot be written to require specific VBL timing these days.

[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:

[alexh]

alenppc wrote:
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).

Cant you use a linux software DVD player on PS3?

[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...

[straycat]

My Minimig arrived (very quickly from Amigakit  :-)) and I made used this firmware straight off so I could go with my LCD monitor. Left the PAL jumper as it is and added two additional ones as instructed in the jpeg. Haven't had time to test very much yet but kick 1.3 / Workbench 1.3 looks great on my Philips LCD monitor.

[straycat]

Has anyone heard any more from yaqube? Has the source code been released? Are there any firmware updates in the pipeline? alexh - have you received your free Minimig yet?   :-D

[yaqube]

I'm still working on the ECS. It's almost done but there are some things to do yet (i.e. full super hires support in Denise).

I decided to try to find the reasons why some games don't work. I've already found some incompatibilities and fixed them (i.e. NZ Story scrolls fine now) but there are still some. I have an almost fully working Action Replay and some debugging stuff build into my MiniMig. I hope it will help to hunt bugs quickly. If you can report which game and in what way does not work it will be very helpful.

I'm quite busy now but expect new firmware with sourcecode in a few weeks.

@alehx: Are you working on adf write support?

[Darrin]

yaqube wrote:
I'm still working on the ECS. It's almost done but there are some things to do yet (i.e. full super hires support in Denise).

I decided to try to find the reasons why some games don't work. I've already found some incompatibilities and fixed them (i.e. NZ Story scrolls fine now) but there are still some. I have an almost fully working Action Replay and some debugging stuff build into my MiniMig. I hope it will help to hunt bugs quickly. If you can report which game and in what way does not work it will be very helpful.

I'm quite busy now but expect new firmware with sourcecode in a few weeks.

I've got my Minimig on order from Amigakit.  You're doing some great work there.  I look forward to trying your ECS code out.  Cheers.   :-)