What is it with the French and their consoles - why are they so lucky?

Might seem a strange question, however, some old consoles that the UK could only use with RF output, or if really lucky, composite; were available with SCART output on French consoles with RGB...

Intellivision - RF only, you can composite mod if you know what you're doing but that's it. French model - composite and RGB.

Atari 7800 - RF only, composite mod is not easy at all, especially for PAL. French model - RGB (I have one).

ColecoVision - RF only, composite mod on NTSC is fine but doesn't seem to work on PAL, and if you swap the chips to get native composite you get rainbow effects on the image. French model - RGB (not sure about composite)

Commodore Amiga CD32 - (i'm working on that system at the moment, and GameCube) - RF, composite and S-video - but the French model does RGB.

*sigh*

Why did the French get these systems with RGB when the UK didn't - the UK is a larger market than the French one, so doesn't make sense! :shrug:

 

I've heard that the French government made Peritel (SCART) with RGB a legal requirement on all consumer video devices. Hence, if a company wanted to sell their console in France they had to comply.

It's not always roses, though - the French NES outputs RGB, but it's just converted from composite.

 

That would make sense, console makers would not invest money in R&D if they have a choice. Interesting. Annoying for the rest of us though, a SCART version wasn't even offered as an option in the UK for these consoles, we got crappy RF; the NES had composite though but not many other old systems.

 

Most consoles released in the UK post-NES supported RGB via SCART. There are obvious exceptions (Master System 2, N64, and a few of the CD-based console failures mid-90s) mostly the big platforms offered it.

I don't know. I think we did ok as far as RGB goes.

 

So which retro UK consoles could do RGB, either natively or via simple modding; I am aware of the Sega Master System 2, TurboGrafx, Amstrad GX4000, PlayStation - which others? RGB on some systems looks far better than composite, although the Nintendo consoles work excellently with composite.

 

The French were lucky mainly due to the French government deciding to have a completely different TV standard to the rest of the world, PAL improves on NTSC and it is not that difficult to change a composite signal into either PAL or NTSC, SECAM on the other hand requires a little more hardware.

A lot of the RGB mods were Composite or similar to RGB which was simpler to do then trying to output a SECAM signal, so the RGB offered isn't 100% crystal clear. The french Atari 2600 did output SECAM and offered a total of 8 colours where as PAL offer 96 and NTSC 128...

 

Sega, Sony and Nintendo consoles all offer RGB natively with the exception of the ones previously listed. No Turbografx system was ever released here.

No they don't, they look like shit. NES especially.

 

As Jamtex said, it was mainly done to avoid having to use SECAM color encoding:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECAM
As most video encoder chips used in games consoles dont support SECAM.

RGB is RGB wherever you are in the world (No NTSC/PAL/SECAM color encoding) and since the French goverment made it mandatory for all French TV's to support SCART "Péritel" connectors in 1980:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART#Origins
It made sense for console manufacturers to use RGB SCART when possible to avoid using SECAM.

In the UK we should be grateful that European TV manufacturers decided not to remove the SCART sockets for TV models sold in countries other than France, as otherwise we would likely not have had SCART connections at all. IIRC SCART sockets started to become common on UK TV's sold around the early/mid 90's, before then it was practically unheard of in the UK.

There was a huge uproar when Sega supplied RGB SCART cables as standard with the original UK Sega Saturn and made the RF box an optional accessory, because many UK TV's at the time still only supported RF (Some people still didnt even know what an RGB SCART cable was) Eventually Sega received so many complaints that they switched to including RF boxes as standard with mid/later produced UK Sega Saturn's.

In addition, due to the problems mentioned above Sega supplied RF boxes with all UK Dreamcasts instead of the Composite/RGB SCART cables included elsewhere, despite SCART connections being quite common in the UK by the Dreamcast's launch in 1999 (A case of once bitten twice shy)

 

Nintendo consoles look good on composite only if the video system is NTSC. They look awful in PAL. Mostly because the video processors on them are actually designed to exploit characteristics of the NTSC video system (for example it uses intentional flickering to reduce noise on the image) and on PAL displays it simply cause the image to be worse instead.

After gathering some experience with video hardware (TV) and getting used to RGB-> video encoder chips I found out that all designs are optimized for NTSC and because of that, PAL users have no option besides resorting to RGB.

An Playstation look awesome when connected to a pure NTSC TV set through S-Video but on a PAL environment you can only obtain similar results (or slightly better) with RGB.

Honestly on a optimal/ideal NTSC configuration you can hardly tell RGB apart from S-Video. I suppose this is why nobody bothered with pushing RGB in the United States besides the real hardcore A/V geeks. :thumbsup:

 

Yes I think it was Philips that had them first in around 1985. I've seen (UK manufactured) Panasonic sets from 1988 with them, and a large proportion of European manufactured sets (B&O/ Philips/ Pye/ Grundig/ ITT Nokia/ Salora/ Luxor etc) also had them (this includes some Hitachi models that were manufactured in Finland).

 

Alchy - The TurboGrafx 16 (TG-16) was American, however the TurboGrafx (not TG-16) was released as PAL format and imported into the UK and sold (can't remember off-hand the company) - I used one of these models in my IntoGrafx handheld portable. The TurboGrafx is about double the size of the PC-Engine; however one nice thing the PAL version has the USA one didn't, was a CTX chip that you could tap RGB and composite off directly, and easily - same chip as used in the SMS for the video.

 

That's interesting. How were they sold, by mail order or in certain shops? They never got a proper launch here, anyway, and I'd certainly never seen one until I got on the internet.

My parents' TV from the late 80s definitely had a SCART socket, and it was a... Matsui? Maybe? Can't remember now.

We definitely held onto RF for too long, anyway, I'll grant you that.

 

French are the best

 

Viva la france!