Which 8-bit to keep?

[Urchlay]

Freddie boards? Is this what the earliest 800XL's had?

 

The Freddie 800XLs came later... from what I understand, the Freddie chip replaces a few of the separate memory-related ICs (address decoders and such).

 

Also, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, the Freddie 800XLs I've read were only made in PAL, not NTSC. Take that with a grain of salt: I might be mis-remembering it, can't even remember where I read that.

[+kheller2]

Yeah, I heard that too. Some were SECAM. However, Best Electonics Rev 10 catalog shows a "prototype" 128K Freddie NTSC 800XL board.

 

I'm guessing, but don't know, that converting a PAL board to NTSC shouldn't be that hard. So, if anybody out there has a Freddie 800XL and wants to ship it stateside for me to own... let me know

 

http://www.atarimax.com/jindroush.atari.or...ps/freddiei.gif

Edited June 27, 2007 by kheller2

[Urchlay]

I'm guessing, but don't know, that converting a PAL board to NTSC shouldn't be that hard. So, if anybody out there has a Freddie 800XL and wants to ship it stateside for me to own... let me know

 

If I had a PAL Atari, I'd leave it PAL... you can use its composite or s-video output with a TV capture card in your PC (all the ones I've ever seen have support for both PAL and NTSC). Not sure if you could use PAL with the RF/CATV input on a US TV capture card, but who uses RF on the Atari anyway, when there's a monitor jack available? A capture card doesn't always give the prettiest display, but it's a lot cheaper/easier than importing a PAL TV (and I've never seen a multi-standard TV here, either).

 

Another possibility: replace the GTIA with an NTSC one, but leave the PAL ANTIC in place. AFAIK, this will give you an NTSC-like signal (as far as the color encoding goes) at 50Hz, which older TVs might sync to if you twiddle the V-hold (I have a TV like this, made in 1976. It can play PAL 2600 games, though with the wrong colors).