SuperCIC PAL/NTSC oddness

N64 is only RGB with PAL if you have a French one with certain serial numbers or Australian, otherwise the video chip does not have the parts to output RGB (only contains green, not red or blue signals), Nintendo removed the facility "to save money".

@reprep - in 8 on SCART you mention goes to widescreen if 5-8v is applied to that connection, or 9.5-12v into 4:3 mode, i've got a switch to connect between either mode as wanted.
Yes, the PAL SNES is native RGB however doesn't have "C-Sync" which means it's either using composite or luma for C-Sync. I don't have a SNES SCART RGB cable to test on, the SNES is going into my Unity system which is SCART anyway, RGB on all systems that take RGB and composite for any others (eg N64). I will test to see if C-Sync is better on composite or luma for RGB. On SCART, pin 20 is either composite input or luma input (if S-video input).

 

You can mod ANY N64 for RGB by building a replacement DAC.

Also, do you have a source for the Australian comment? As thats not one I have heard before.

The reason french consoles had RGB on the board is because France uses SECAM. Australia doesnt, so them having the same board as the french machines makes no sense.

 

No, don't have the source for the Australian comment, it was documented a few years back. Yes, French consoles can be handy, they had native RGB for (some) N64, Intellivision, Atari 7800, Colecovision consoles; the circuits on UK models didn't have that built in. I got a French Atari 7800 for that reason.

One interesting thing just saw on YouTube - he says: "here is a video in 1080p to clearly demonstrate how differently rgb video is generated then composite video,as you can see in rgb mode the picture is diagonally generated,whereas in composite video mode the picture is horizontal generated." which would indicate that using C-Sync might give a different result tapping luma instead of composite, if i'm reading it right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9FomJpUPUg

 

LOL @ the YouTube vid.

There's no such thing as diagonally generated video.

 

0-2 V=TV, 5-8 V=WideScreen, 9.5-12 V=AV Mode. that's for pin 8 of scart. As pin 3 of multi av output of PAL snes outputs 12v, my TV automatically change the channel to scart av channel when my snes is on. Of course that is with official PAL SNES RGB SCART cable which connects pin 3 to pin 8 of scart.

AFAIK official PAL SNES RGB SCART cable connects pin 9 of SNES multi-output to pin 20 of scart. You can modify the cable (or the console) to take it from pin 7 instead of pin 9 for using luminance instead of composite as sync signal.

Picture on my TV with scart from SNES is good, there is no visible pattern etc and i am using HDTV. Of course i would very much like to see that if using luminance instead of composite increases quality.

 

In fact, we were lucky : the SNES outputs PAL, and it was mandatory to have SCART on all TV sold after 1980. So Nintendo decided to use RGB instead of having a custom chip which would output SECAM through S-video or composite.
With the N64 release, almost all tv were PAL/SECAM, so they stopped bothering.

 

Thats kinda what I was getting at - to get around the SECAM issue, they just used RGB. This is why a bunch of consoles had RGB in france but not elsewhere.

It seems like the N64 was designed with this in mind, then they realised the SECAM issue wasnt much of a problem anymore and just went PAL only. However, this was after a run of boards were already produced.

 

I opened up my early Australian N64 (it had an "EUR" model number, so it's probably just ordinary PAL model boxed up for over here) and it didn't have the S-RGB A chip like the two "FRA" model ones I brought. I say the idea that Australian N64s have RGB capability is full of Bologna. We never had SCART over here to the best of my knowledge either.

 

Id agree with you

 

Opened up my Aussie N64, no S-RGB chip. Just the DENC-NUS.

Board is NUS (nudge nudge hint hint) - CPU (P) -01 1996.

So maybe a quick way to see if the board DOESN'T have the S-RGB is to look above the cartridge slot and see if it starts with NUS?

 

N-n-n-necropost!

I can confirm that it is very, very rare for a ozzie CRT TV to have a scart socket, no idea about LCD TV's though.

I picked up a Jap version of SMW2 recently and it behaves even stranger. It seems to sync OK when the screen is full of colour, but loses sync when ever there's a lot of black at the top of the screen. Very, very odd.

So just to reiterate, my PAL SuperCIC SNES behaves *very* strangely whenever you try any SuperFX game (PAL or NTSC), I'm waiting for Dirt Racer and Doom to turn up but I'm guessing they will act the same.