Atari 7800 European model

[+Intellivision Master]

Will an Atari 7800 EU model with an HD mod, work on an NTSC HDTV?  Like, can the TV detect the signal since the console is PAL?  Also, can the PAL model play NTSC 7800 games and homebrews?  As well as NTSC 2600 games and homebrews?

[juansolo]

There is currently no HD mod for the 7800. You're either getting composite video or S-video out of any mod and that'll be in the standard of the console (PAL/NTSC). If you use some sort of video encoder, that'll need to be able to chew on PAL composite or S-Video. What that outputs will likely be (depending on what you get) either RGBs @50hz, RGBhv 640x480 @50hz (VGA, essentially), 480p50 component video or hdmi. That's line-doubling style standards conversion though. If you go with a scaler what comes out of it is what you set it to, however there's always an element of lag with a scaler, the amount of which varies from model to model.

 

If you're talking about the French RGB 7800, that internally creates S-video and it's got a very simple RGB encoder in there that utterly mangles the signal and ruins it.

 

As for whether your TV or not can handle the composite video or S-Video PAL signal, that'll vary from TV to TV. The more modern it is, the less likely it is to have decent analogue processing.

 

Technically the PAL 7800 is not region locked and will play some 7800 games and homebrew. However expect some on-screen corruption, dodgy colours or slowdown if it works at all. It's very hit and miss and it's in no way what you'd consider a multi-region console. Same goes for the 2600 side, but that can even have trouble with 2600 PAL homebrew depending on the hardware lottery. As I've said many times, the 7800 is very variable in that regard and some of them can be quite problematic, more so we've found in the PAL world than NTSC.

Edited November 12, 2022 by juansolo