SAP Questions (NTSC vs PAL, speeds, etc.)

[DavidD]

I feel like this is incredibly obvious, but....

 

I've been fooling around with SAP players, and noticed something -- namely, tracks seem slower than on real Ataris.  However, this might just be PAL vs NTSC, so I thought I'd check.

 

For example, if I play the Donkey Kong SAP in Foobar, it's distinctly slower in tempo as opposed to playing Donkey Kong in NTSC on an emulator.

 

Am I right in assuming that all NTSC designed music is played -slower- in SAP players, as SAP players are designed for PAL speed music?  Or am I just doing it wrong?

 

(If there is a speed difference -- what is it?)

[TGB1718]

Maybe a dumb question but whats SAP players ?

[Rybags]

Not sure.  The SAP player I have seems to offer no framerate override, so possibly it's encoded into the file at creation time.  Most older games have the music created with their home system in mind (so often sounded wrong on the other TV system).  In the modern day some compose music with PAL in mind then do NTSC playback and skip processing every 6th frame which keeps the speed the same (and amazingly enough sounds fine).

 

Aside from PAL/NTSC there could also be a difference in that the actual Atari framerates aren't 60 and 50 or even 59.94 and 50 but less.

Actual are 59.9227 and 49.8607 which AFAIK are only offered by Altirra so other emulators might be off (including music players).

But I doubt most people would pick the difference there.

 

Another consideration that probably gets even less attention, although using the 64 KHz 8-bit mode we have plenty of wrongly toned notes anyway - Pokey output frequencies are a result of contdown timers (aka divisors) that act on the host clock input, so the same AUDF values will always be slightly higher pitched on NTSC systems, approx 1.79 vs 1.77 MHz.

[Xuel]

SAP defaults to PAL timings. For TYPE B, C, S and R songs, you can add the following line to the SAP header to make them play back with NTSC timings:

FASTPLAY 262

Here is the Donkey Kong SAP from ASMA with that modification:

 

Donkey_Kong_NTSC.sap

 

See also:

 

http://asap.sourceforge.net/sap-format.html

[DavidD]

On 7/15/2020 at 8:37 AM, Xuel said:

SAP defaults to PAL timings. For TYPE B, C, S and R songs, you can add the following line to the SAP header to make them play back with NTSC timings:

FASTPLAY 262

Here is the Donkey Kong SAP from ASMA with that modification:

 

Donkey_Kong_NTSC.sap 1.89 kB · 2 downloads

 

See also:

 

http://asap.sourceforge.net/sap-format.html

I figured that out on my own while perusing the archive, but thanks!  There's an NTSC header in the newer SAPs that automatically sets them to the right playback, but the older ones don't have it.  Not as easy as an "NTSC/PAL" switch in the player itself, but such is life.