A query for those in PAL land, or anyone who may know more than I - I just got hold of a PAL gamecube but when it's hooked up to my multistandard display, it seems waaaay over bright & the contrast seems messed up. I use other PAL equipment on that display, so I know that it's OK. Does anyone have any ideas what might be behind the display funkyness? The PAL cube didn't come with any cables, so I'm using US composite cables (tried several known good cables, with same results) - are they different in any way to the European ones? I know about the RGB/Component differences between US/Euro cubes, but I thought that the composite cables were more or less the same. Are there any pots or anything in a PAL cube that might be out of adjustment in some way? ~Limey~
The PAL ones do require fiddling with the brightness, colour and contrast and the picture does seem overly bright in some colours and hard to see on others, if you are using composite video compared to the American console... however via an RGB SCART lead they are much nicer and clearer.
Well, after sitting the PAL cube in a corner for a few months whilst working on other projects, last night I tried it out again with some other composite cables - same result. However, on a whim, I plugged it into a component cable - bingo, perfect video display! Now I'm left wondering if there something special inside PAL region composite cables, or if there is some oddball incompatibility between the cube & my multi-standard monitor? Every other piece of PAL kit I have works just fine on composite with it...
No it seems that the PAL gamecube has horrible colour output via composite and s-video but is good with component and RGB SCART. You can try any composite video cable from any of the Nintendo systems and you'll get the same result, horrible dark muddy output. As normal Nintendo show the love for PAL community again.
Are all the PAL units really that bad?? Here's some pics I took for comparison - a little blurry, since they were quick shots, but the PAL composite is really awful & pretty much unplayable. But way too bright, rather than dark. PAL composite: PAL component: NTSC composite: ~Limey~
Yep. Actually, I've now tried 5 or 6 different composite cables with the same results. They're all US cables - if the PAL region cables are the same as the US ones, then either something is funky with the composite output/connector on the cube, or it's putting out a signal that my monitor doesn't like.
It's the cube itself. The cables contain no circuitry except for the GC Component Video cable that contains some. It's the reason you never saw 3rd party GC Component cables. You should use RGB SCART whenever possible.
I don't have a display with RGB SCART where this particular unit is in use, but the component output is working fine for me. I knew about the apparent custom IC in the component cables (I'm glad I bagged one from the Nintendo store before they become the currency of ebay carpetbaggers). Given that the component out is OK, does anyone have any idea whereabouts the problem may lie? Either the component cable circuit is correcting the signal, or the fault lies in ciruitry exclusive to the PAL signal generation (I'm suspecting the latter, but don't currently know how to fix it/where to tweak).
It's probably a crap circuit to encode the composite video and more importantly why the foxing buggery do you want Composite video? Next you'll be asking if the N64 RF encoder works on the Gamecube...
It's quite blurry since I took it with the phone's camera, but I tell you, in real, it looks god way better than what limey posted. It's a PAL GC bought on release (with the Dvideo connector).
Foxing buggery? Not often I hear expressions like that on this side of the big pond... :lol: To be honest, the main reason is that I'd run out of spare component inputs on my switchbox & hate having to mess with cables when I want to play PAL games. The secondary reason, is simply that the crappy composite display is annoying & I'd like to fix it, if possible to do so. Blame the engineer in me for that. ~Limey~ ps: I actually do have a GC RF encoder (it came with one of my cubes - have never used it, though)! :110:
