Harmony Encore games in B&W

[Tony Kingsmill]

I received my Harmony Encore yesterday and so far really pleased with it. I have the micro SD version, updated the firmware to Pal 50 and downloaded the entire 2600 roms collection from Atari Mania. So far it's working great on my on my 2600 Jr and 6-switch 2600, both over RF video on a modern TV. I have a question though that I hope someone can help with... I've downloaded a handful of PAL roms from different places, forum threads and other download sites including Montezuma's Revenge, Thrust+ and Zippy. Although they worked, they are only displaying in black and white mode. Montezuma's Revenge has flickering green blocks at the bottom of the screen, but the actually game looks fine, apart from being in black and white.

 

I've tried the reset button, toggling black and white button etc but no luck. Every game I've tried from the Atari Mania collection has worked fine. I'm wondering whether the Atari Mania roms are perhaps prepped in some way for the Harmony cartridge, where the roms I've downloaded are not? Or perhaps there's something in my setup that I need to look at, such as my power supply. I'm looking at upgrading one of my machines to AV out soon so I'm hoping that could make a difference. Any suggestions welcome and thanks in advance!

[+batari]

I would check to make sure the ROMs you are using are PAL. If you use NTSC ROMs on a PAL system, they come up in black and white on some TVs. The last time I checked, the ROMs in that collection were intermixed, so you would have to go through the collection and separate out the NTSC and PAL ROMs. The PAL roms should say "(PAL)" in the filename somewhere so you can pick these out.

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Thrust+ is switchable (left difficulty) between PAL and NTSC, but not into B&W. So your problem must be something else.

[Tony Kingsmill]

Thanks for the quick replies guys. I solved the issue - well sort of. I've upgraded my 6-switch 2600 today to AV outputs and I'm getting a colour output, so the problem may have been down to a poor quality RF signal on a modern TV. I'm getting some image quality issues over the new AV output but that's another story for another day!

[Marcos Moutta]

On 5/10/2020 at 7:04 PM, Tony Kingsmill said:

Thanks for the quick replies guys. I solved the issue - well sort of. I've upgraded my 6-switch 2600 today to AV outputs and I'm getting a colour output, so the problem may have been down to a poor quality RF signal on a modern TV. I'm getting some image quality issues over the new AV output but that's another story for another day!

Yeah, I have a similar issue here. I guess my console's RF signal is weak or something, so it only displays color on some tvs in certain instances. Good thing I have a VCR with me that allows me to use it on any tv through composite!