Screenshots of SECAM format games?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Just out of curiosoty...did SECAM TV's themselves display limited colors for...well...TV programs?

No, the SECAM system has the same color resolution than NTSC and PAL.

 

I guess the market was too small, so Atari decided for a cheap solution.

[Room 34]

Ugh... can you imagine TV programming being in only 8 colors? Yikes!

[Eckhard Stolberg]

I'm still curious: why do the SECAM games only have a handful of colors? Is it because of the sequential color data broadcasting method? Would that have required a complete redesign of the TIA to produce a decent palette on that video standard?

 

I think you are right. The TIA is a line based video chip, and it hardly has enough video RAM for all the objects in only one scanline. SECAM requires the colour information to be encoded in two consecutive scanlines. To be able to get a full pallette in SECAM the VCS would have to be able to store the previous scanline, which would be additionally difficult, because many games change the graphics data while it is displayed.

 

The VCS palette consists of 16 hues with 8 levels of luminance each. All three TV formats use the luminance for the old B/W picture. The colour information is encoded as differences between one of the primary colours and the luminance. For the SECAM VCS Atari just assigned fixed colours to the 8 levels of luminance. I suppose that way they can easily encode the colours on a line by line basis, alternating the two difference values between the odd and the even lines.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[doppel]

Well, whatever the case, games sure do look ugly with the SECAM palette. No wonder no games were designed to accomodate it.

[jjessop]

SECAM 2600's used a PAL TIA and generated the colors from the luminance lines (LUM) and hence only eight colors.

 

Pete Gerrard (of Pete's test cart fame) and the principal Engineer of the 5200 (NOT the controllers) was in charge of SECAM conversions at Atari. In addition to the bizarre color scheme SECAM also uses AM sound.

 

Dan Kramer of Trakball fame and myself were the techs working on most of the SECAM conversions. Thank goodness modern consoles don't have RF modulators and use SECAM or PAL-N, M, anymore!

 

Jerry

[Tempest]

In addition to the bizarre color scheme SECAM also uses AM sound.  

 

My God, what kind of backwards country used this format? Oh wait it's France...

 

Seriously though, SECAM users got royally dicked over...

 

Tempest

[Vigo]

Well, its not as bad as SECAM, but i think Atari also really messed up the PAL version of the TIA. They stole us 24 colours, and rearranged them really weirdly. I suppose they didn´t think the VCS would be a large success outside America, spending less engineering effort designing the PAL version.

[doppel]

It seems to me the only real differences between the PAL and NTSC versions of the 2600 are the slower crystal clock and the TIA palette, unless you also count the 220 volt change. Seems to me changing the TIA palette would have been even more work.

[Vigo]

It seems to me the only real differences between the PAL and NTSC versions of the 2600 are the slower crystal clock and the TIA palette, unless you also count the 220 volt change.  Seems to me changing the TIA palette would have been even more work.

 

To me, it seems they barely modified the NTSC circuit on the chip to generate colours on PAL TVs. But since both standards differ significantly, that´s probably the reason for the weird PAL colour palette.

 

Btw, the PAL Atari uses, like the NTSC versio´n 9V DC.