Subject: Re: [stella] PAL Conversion Preferences From: "Eckhard Stolberg" <Eckhard_Stolberg@xxxxxx> Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:49:41 +0100 |
Hello Christopher, > 99,99% of PAL conversions are done like that. Only issue > I think can think of is to get the balance as to *where* > adding the additional scannlines, so that the picture is > good centered. I'm sure Eckhard can help you with > testing that. If you put 25 extra blank lines into the vertical blank and 25 lines into the overscan, the picture would be centered on the PAL TV. But that would also also slow down the game speed, since your game is now running with 50 fps instead of 60 fps. In my experience the vast majority of PAL TVs can handle a 60 Hz signal, as long as you do a proper sync signal. Many multistandard TVs can even do a PAL60 mode, where they use the PAL colours, but stretch the 60 Hz picture to fill the whole screen. On such a TV the graphics will have the same aspect ratio as on a NTSC TV. Therefore I would prefer a PAL60 port of your game. You need to do an even number of scanlines in every frame though, or the PAL TV will show incorrect colours or even no colours at all in the next frame. As for your SECAM question, I think some of the EbiVision games have an optional SECAM mode selectable through the Colour / Black and White switch. The input of this switch is hardwired to B/W on a SECAM console, although the switch itself still turns off the colour generation in hardware. Atari's PAL games also had the colours for B/W mode selected in such a way that they would look good in SECAM. If you still have the Colour / B-W switch unused in your game, you could probably do that too. There aren't too many colours in Space Invaders, so it should be possible to find usable matches for SECAM. I'm not sure how well SECAM handles 60 Hz signals though. You might have to add the blank scanlines for this mode to make it work. but if you have a free dificulty switch, maybe you could add both, a %0 Hz and a 60 Hz mode, to the PAL/SECAM version. > (Though - don't go for any color suggestions from him - > pick the colors with Stella! :-) ) I'd agree with Manuel on not trusting me with colours, but as long as you have to use an emulator to chose yourr PAL colours there is no way to escape my choces. ;-) The PAL palette in the old versions of Stella is the one I did for PCAE, and the PAL palette in the current version of Stella is based on the one we used in the old versions of z26. So even all three emulators have different PAL palettes at the moment, they all were partly created by me. If Manuel (or anyone else out there) doesn't like the palettes and thinks he can create a better one, PLEASE do so. I'd really love to see a proper PAL palette used in the 2600 emulators. ;-) > Hm... it probably will look *exactly* the same. I think > if you add those 19%, they will rather look *stretched* > for us... :-) No, Christopher is right. Both PAL and NTSC TVs have an aspect ratio of 4:3. But NTSC displays only 200 scanlines in this area, while PAL display 240 lines. So if you put a 200 line display centered on a 240 line screen, the picture will look vertically squeezed compared to the original. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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