On Fri May 15 11:51:06 1998, Glenn Saunders wrote:
>> That arises a question for me - is there any way for the program to find
>> out whether it's running in a PAL, NTSC or SECAM environment?
>
>IMHO, there are two decent ways to support PAL/NTSC:
>
>1) a difficulty or console switch to toggle.
>2) two separate assemblies.
>
>The advantage of the latter is that it frees up a little code for other
>things.
I know about this. Way 2) was taken by most of the companies, and they
rewrote the colors at that time too, to fit into the PAL or SECAM
scheme.
But this leads to the fact that if you try to import an US cartridge to
Europe, for example, it won't work properly in all cases. And some games
weren't released in Europe (at least in Austria, that is...), for
instance, Track & Field (as far as I know...). And considering the
number of people who would buy a 2600 cartridge today, Way 2) would mean
that there'd have to be two seperate cartridge production runs, for PAL
and NTSC, which makes the whole thing more expensive, or leads to the
fact that one of the runs isn't done if it isn't considered as
profitable, like it was then. So in my opinion, Version 1) would be
better nowadays. But that uses up one difficulty or console switch. So
the question would be if there's a way for the software to tell whether
it runs on PAL or NTSC without requiring the user to tell it to the
program.
With love (and the hope that I don't post too much)
Kurt Woloch
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