Hey, i just have a random question, why can my dreamcast display pal60 games on my ntsc tv at full color and full speed? is the signal actually pal or is transformed into ntsc? because when i do pal i see it in black and white and the screen rotates really fast, you cant see anything.
It probably isn't doing PAL at all. I've ran a few PAL games on my japanese Dreamcast and onesthat don't suport 60htz mode just role like hell. So maybe the game you are using has the 60htz mode available. I'm pretty sure it just outputs an NTSC signal though. Yakumo
yeah, the game is headhunter , now i only need shenmue 2, evil twin and rez , gotta love the pal cases
The key there is in your refresh rate - you're running Headhunter at 60Hz, and that's what keeps it from rolling. It's not the PAL signal itself that produces a rolling picture, but the normal 50Hz refresh rate of PAL games. As for Dreamcast, it's just outputting your game in NTSC mode, which is why you have full color and a reasonable aspect ratio. Some systems (the old Atari Jaguar I had comes to mind) can output at 60hz but still in the PAL format - you won't have the rolling picture, but you'll have no color and this goofy-as-hell aspect ratio that almost makes the image look like a perfect square. Dreamcast is pretty nice about fixing that for you.
Hmm, the cube and Xbox both output pal-60 (ie. 60 hz AND the extra lines pal does) but I know that the PS2 simply outputs NTSC when it says pal-60. Not sure about dreamcast though
The Dreamcast changes the image depending on what cable you are using. PAL 60Htz games actually run in NTSC on an NTSC machine because that's what the DC finds. Games such as PAL Skies of Arcadia will run in 60htz PAL mode if forced to by a bood disc but all the colour will be missing but the resolution will be fine. But this will only work if you use RGB or S-Video. Use AV and you get nothing. The DC is quite a little clever beast when it comes to it's output. Yakumo
If you use RGB it will definately be in colour - PAL and NTSC colour only apply to RF/composite/s-video. Yeah, the PAL DCs output PAL-60. God knows why Sony made the PAL PS2s output 60Hz in NTSC only - it's not really helping the issue of us getting shitty 50Hz conversions. Most PS2 owners don't know the wonders RGB SCART (because Sony are too cheap to sell them with PS2s and only give us crappy composite cables), and most PAL TVs (nearly everything made before this decade) can't do SCART. SCEE are tards. That ain't right. PAL-60 is still 525 lines (about 480 lines used for actual video) just like NTSC - TVs won't be able to handle 576-line video *and* 60Hz video because the horizontal frequency will be too high, not to mention resizing interlaced video on-the-fly would require a lot of processing and will look shit. If you look at the on-screen display of your TV when displaying PAL-60 stuff you'll notice it's vertically stretched - this is because of the lower resolution.
Yeah, they're destined to crack and fall apart. I recommend getting some crap games too so you have some spare parts ^_^ And I thought the PAL PS1 cases were bad enough...
The answer is indeed that your machine is NTSC so outputs NTSC. The only differences you should get in a PAL signal are rolling (50Hz) and/or no colour (PAL using a different carrier frequency for colour information). If your TV accepts PAL signals, you'll be fine anyway. This is usually only composite (or indeed that it can accept RGB at 50Hz), not RF. This century? SCART was introduced in the 1980s, and became standard on most (non 14") television sets in the UK (and indeed Europe - as it is a French standard from Peritel) by the mid-90s. In fact, EVERY television set sold in France since 1980 has had to have a SCART socket by legislation. It was, however, used in the UK before the mid 90s - there is a Sony Beta VCR that has a SCART socket on, and that was introduced in 1985. So, in the UK it took maybe 10 years to become commonplace, but the past 10 years of televisions have pretty much all had SCART sockets! I'd say that's probably the majority in the country!
Yeah, you've been missed, Retro. I actually took some audiovisual production classes in college - so I studied differences between TV standards. Apparently, different teams in different countries were working on different versions upon the advent of television, and that's how we got to where we are. I really hope the next generation of TVs is universal - and thus, we can all import and export our consoles!
True indeed, Hadn't thought of that. But there are power converters in every Radioshack. Not as expensive as TV Standard converters. I think, anyway.
Yeah, I was hoping everything would get standardised with digital TV, but that didn't happen -_- North America is using ATSC, most other places are using DVB, and Japan are using their own magical system. At least all the standards allow for the same resolutions, but the 50 and 60Hz-based framerates (23.976p, 29.97p and 59.94i/p vs. 25p and 50i/p) still carry on, and the transmission methods are different between the systems. But **hopefully** this could mean games can run at the same speeds worldwide as all HDTVs are supposed to be able to handle all the different framerates.
