Programming for Different World Regions on the Atari 2600 | 8Blit
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- Опубликовано: 28 июн 2024
- There were three major region broadcast standards in the world. NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. In this episode we explore the history behind the formation of the different standards and how you can program your own ATARI 2600 games to target one or more.
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#atari2600 #atarihomebrew #8bit #ntsc #pal #secam #programming #retrogaming #atari #retroprogramming #atarivcs #assembly #dasm
The examples are written in Assembly Language, for the dasm compiler. All examples have been tested using the Stella Emulator.
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This episode provides answers and examples for the following questions.
What are the different television regions in the world?
Why are there different television regions in the world?
What is NTSC?
What is PAL?
What is SECAM?
Why does SECAM have so few colors?
Why are the colors different between regions?
How many frames per second for NTSC?
How many frames per second for PAL?
How many frames per second for SECAM?
How many scanlines for NTSC?
How many scanlines for PAL?
How many scanlines for SECAM?
Can an NTSC ATARI 2600 game work in a PAL console?
Can a PAL ATARI 2600 game work in a NTSC console?
What are the differences between regions on the ATARI 2600?
How do I program ATARI 2600 games for different regions?
How can I program ATARI 2600 games that work on PAL and SECAM consoles?
How do symbols work in 6502 assembly language?
How to use assembler conditial statment 6502 assembly?
How to pass a parameter into the 6502 dasm assembler?
How to pass parameters from the command line with dasm assembler?
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Support
02:13 History of Television
06:00 Differences in technology
08:45 Why programming regions
10:15 Effects on the 2600
12:05 Using symbols for the assembler
16:45 Conditional assembler statements
21:58 Passing parameters from a batch file
23:49 Outro
I had a lot of fun building the example code for this episode and I didn't know where to stop! I think this is my longest episode to date. I cover NTSC, PAL, SECAM, multi-regional carts, batch building. There's so much information in here and I hope you all love it!
Please leave a comment about your experience programming or using carts from different regions. Did you have PAL? SECAM? What's the best SECAM game?
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Great and very detailed video as always, I'd been waiting for this one a while. I've got a couple of Atari systems including a SECAM "Darth Vader" model. The first Atari I bought since starting my 8 bit collection. It was with this unit I discovered that France had been cursed with only 8 colours from the TIA. However to the best of my knowledge a true SECAM TIA chip was never developed. Atari knew that the SECAM market was much too small to justify developing a special chip for the region and integrated a load more electronics onto the mainboard of the SECAM 2600. This allowed the unit to be used with an existing PAL or NTSC TIA chip but did not process the signals from them in the same way resulting in the colour palate France got. Some games were recoded to allow them to be coloured properly in the SECAM regions, for example a PAL version of the Smurfs displays a green Smurf on a SECAM system, that's just weird. While a few other games were unplayable due to background and players being displayed using the same colours on SECAM systems. Excellent work as always thank you ;)
Thank you very much, I'm glad you found it interesting!
A small caveat about PAL in South America: In Brazil we had PAL-M, which is a mix of Phase Alternating color encoding and (absurdly close to) NTSC frame and carrier specifications. PAL-M was 59.97Hz just like NTSC, and very often the color encoding in consoles was dealt with by using the NTSC version but toggling in a phase shifter circuit in the color carrier for alternate lines.
In any case, the Brazilian versions of the 2600 (the official Polyvox, and the unofficial Dynavision, CCE, Milmar and Gemini) display the same colors as the NTSC 2600.
In Argentina, there was also PAL-60, which meant PAL color encoding and frequencies, but NTSC frame timings. To the best of my knowledge, there were no specific games that used that encoding, instead using the PAL frame timings. Maybe an Argentinian 2600 owner can chime in?
Awesome, thanks for providing that information! I have more research to do!
Another greatly detailed and thorough explanation. I appreciate your efforts and enjoy each episode. Great work!
Thank you very much!
I'm in for more betterer :) and conditional assembly! Thanks, Kyle, for the video!
My pleasure, more to come!
excellent, You got another subscriber, greetings from Brazil!
Awesome, thank you! New episode should be out in about a week!
Excelllent video. Here in Brazil we used PAL-M, that is in fact 60Hz, and this specific variant wasn't addressed. Could you please clarify how things should be set to it?
Thanks Claudio! PAL-M is a interesting variant of both NTSC and PAL. The frame rate and scanlines of NTSC with the color encoding of PAL. In this case coding for an NTSC region would give you a stable screen.
Hey I’m wanting to get into making Atari games but all I know for coding is excel and I’m not great at that is there a dummy course for basic coding you could direct me to or maybe one of your videos?
Awesome, I'd be glad to! In the first video of the series we setup a basic dev environment and run some example code. It might seem like a hassle to use the command line for this, but I think it's important to see how that works. A few episodes later I go into detail on how to use visual studio code to program. The first episode is here. ruclips.net/video/WcRtIpvjKNI/видео.htmlsi=pnZzNMDJinv1xa1m