Such a thing as PAL Amiga games?

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 8:48 am

I see a lot of Amiga games on Ebay coming from the UK and know the Vic-20 games have the screen centering issue...does the Amiga games there do the same thing or cause it's a newer system/software with more memory they made adjustments to this??

Newbie alert!
Brian

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 10:40 am

A lot of the Amiga UK games are PAL. You will need to switch your Amiga to PAL mode and have a monitor that supports PAL to play them.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 11:29 am

It's not just a question of centering. NTSC Amiga Lo-res is 320x200 while it is 320x256 on PAL...

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 11:31 am

I remember that there was a bug in the PAL Amiga500 or kickstart 1.3... Sometimes it booted up in 640x200 instead of 640x256! Then it was just to reboot...

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 12:48 pm

Seems like I'll be buying from North America on these games!

Thanks guys!
Brian

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 6:52 am

No, you shouldn't have to. Almost all Amigas can switch back and forth between PAL and NTSC. I thought you said you had a PAL/NTSC switcher disk.

The only thing I can't remember is whether you needed the Enhanced Chip Set (Super Denise?/Fat Agnus?) do be able to do the switch.

But if you buy North American games then you can be sure they will run okay, yes.

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:49 am

ral-clan wrote:No, you shouldn't have to. Almost all Amigas can switch back and forth between PAL and NTSC. I thought you said you had a PAL/NTSC switcher disk.

The only thing I can't remember is whether you needed the Enhanced Chip Set (Super Denise?/Fat Agnus?) do be able to do the switch.

But if you buy North American games then you can be sure they will run okay, yes.

I was thinking about that disk afterwards and now knowing it's use

Wonder if the monitor will work though....have to see if there's a switch on the back or clap 3 times to go into PAL or something

Brian

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:51 am

Most of the Amiga monitors made by Commodore were able to handle PAL and NTSC (I think

).

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:26 pm

The NTSC monitors will crop the bottom off of a PAL display on an Amiga, and the PAL monitors will show a dead area at the bottom on an NTSC game. Other than that, both types of Amigas will handle both types of software. There may be exceptions where they are doing nasty hardware tricks that I'm not aware of that don't work this way.

It's more a cosmetic problem than anything else. I know a fair few games just filled the extra PAL lines with non-essential art so that it'd work on both systems and wouldn't leave PAL players with an ugly black bar.

-Mark G.

idrougge · Post by **idrougge** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:00 pm

saundby wrote:The NTSC monitors will crop the bottom off of a PAL display on an Amiga, and the PAL monitors will show a dead area at the bottom on an NTSC game.

Well, no, not really. If the game really is NTSC, and makes the Amiga run in NTSC mode, it will switch modes and cover the entire screen. However, most Amiga games tended to use 320x200 mode even in PAL, partly to accomodate NTSC restrictions, partly because they were ported to or from the Atari ST, which was always letterboxed in PAL.