Is it possible to use a high-res screenmode on a pal tv without flickering and without flickerfixer?

[Imerion]

Is it possible to use a high-res screenmode on a pal tv without flickering and without flickerfixer? I have an A1200 030-50 10 mb ram and OS 3.0. Please tell me if this is possible.

[KennyR]

It's not. It's a limitation of the TV.

[GPT]

Maybe on a pal monitor that has ben modified a bit but not on a tv.

[Ilwrath]

Is it possible to use a high-res screenmode on a pal tv without flickering and without flickerfixer?

HiRes?  Sure...  640x256 is considered "HiRes" though.

Interlaced (640x512), which is probably what you are meaning, will flash/flicker, though.  Hardware design.  The best you can do is try to pick low-contrast colors for your workbench.  Dark blue, with a mid-blue text doesn't flicker too bad, but if it's not a perfect picture on a TV, it may be very hard to read, as not enough contrast.......  Experimenting with colors is your only hope, unless you want to buy it a flicker-free monitor. (not 1084 series -- the 1950/60 series)

[Kent]

It takes a piece of hardware but you can get some of them dirt cheap.  Grab a set of polarized sunglasses and use them when in interlaced mode.  Viola... no more flicker.  If it still bothers you, reduce the contrast and increase the brightness.

:pint:

[iamaboringperson]

Please tell me if this is possible.

Yep, it's possible, just select 'hi-res' :-)

Or better yet, buy a graphics card, and decent monitor. :lol:

[Karlos]

Sure. Get a 100Hz Sony widescreen TV. Those things essentially have flicker fixing hardware built in and run at 100Hz vertical refresh. Any PAL signal they show tends to look nice and flickerless :-)

Not as cheap as the sunglasses or a flickerfixer / monitor combo mind you :-)

[AmigaHeretic]

I use to use a little program called MagicTV.  It can be found on aminet here:

http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/util/wb/magictv2.lha

It only works on 16 color screens or lower though and requires AGA.  It works great if you want a Hi-Res Workbench on your TV or 15khz monitor.

AmigaGuy

[Karlos]

Ilwrath wrote:
...The best you can do is try to pick low-contrast colors for your workbench.  Dark blue, with a mid-blue text doesn't flicker too bad, but if it's not a perfect picture on a TV, it may be very hard to read, as not enough contrast.......  

Actually, there was a patch available a few years ago called 'MagicTV'. If I recall correctly, it uses two sets of bitplanes (thereby restricting AGA systems to 16 colours) and does some custom chip trickery to help eliminate the flicker.

I used it for a while before getting my gfx card and it was very effective at reducing the flickering on both my TV and 1084.

The author stopped developing it after a while, but you can probably still find it on aminet.

[Karlos]

@Amigaguy

:lol: you beat me to it :-)

-edit-

It had the rather cool side effect that text etc appeared a bit antialiased too. It probably wasn't but it used to look that way on my system.

[AmigaHeretic]

You remeber that program too?  You must be old like me   :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

[Karlos]

Well, I was recently accused of becoming an old fart :-D

[leirbag28]

Oh Boy Oh Boy, some of yu don't get out much.......Yes  it is possible to at least minimize Flickering in PAL Hires Interlaced......one of the reasons the screen flickers is because of those one pixel thin black lines around the borders of windows and buttons and gadgets wich contrast greatly against the one pixel thick white lines........ Solution?  get Visual Prefs from Aminet...and MUI....whith visual prefs.....double the thickness of the lines and change any lines that are black on the Title bars, butttons gadgets, window borders... to dark grey and the white lines to a very light grey ( and of course like I said make them double the thickness) and you will be surprised how much less it flickers! totally usable!...now do the same thing to as many Public screens as possible and those will flicker less as well.  
 Now the colors dont have to be Dark grey and Light grey....you can also use....lets say.....dark blue for the shadow and  very light blue for the shine........ trust me my workbench looks nice and flickerless and actually has about as little flicker as a PC connected to a TV with a flickerFixer. Also Ive noticed PAL always flickers much more than NTSC.

[AmigaHeretic]

Also Ive noticed PAL always flickers much more than NTSC.

I think it has to do with the refresh rate.  NTSC is 60hz and PAL is only 50hz...I believe.

AmigaGuy

[leirbag28]

oops!  I forgot to mention...on top of Everything I just said.....if you want even less flickering....add a genlock (I guess a PAL one for you) like the SuperGen SX and click the notch filter.....it adds some anti aliasing so it now might look a little blurry....so I definitely recommend using bigger and thicker fonts like FuturaB 12 or Workbench 12...................I use my Amiga on an NTSC S-Video TV  full time! and its excellent!