Please help. Strange characters at bottom.

[pryme]

Goodday,

 

I just got my atari 7800 today, and I notice when playing 7800 carts, that there appear strange bands of characters at the bottom of the screen, flashing, moving fast...the rest of the screen is playable, just squashed I think abit verticaly. When I play 2600 games, there seems no problem. Just with the 7800 carts...(Astroids plays just fine)...Is it cuz of the difference in NTSC / Pal ?? I believe the carts are ntsc cuz I bought them from someone in the us...but, the screen is not roling or something...just that anoying large band of characters at the bottom...

 

maybe not a good insert?

 

anyone?

 

please??

 

thanks!

Marco

[Room 34]

Are they actually characters, or just a bunch of scrambled graphics?

 

I play all of my carts exclusively on my 7800 (why bother hooking up the 2600?)... All of my 2600 carts play with no problem (except some Activision ones that need a "jiggle" but then work), but I have some problems with certain 7800 carts. For instance, my Pole Position II cartridge always gets screwy about halfway through the "race" round. Some of the other 7800 games also go garbled after a while.

 

I remember back in the early '80s, my best friend had a Colecovision that did this, and I had some friends with NES systems in the late '80s that also had these kinds of problems.

 

What exactly is it about carts on these systems that causes them to malfunction like this? And how come it never EVER happens with 2600 carts? Anyone...?

[pryme]

they are scrambled graphics...not -static noise - or anything, real scrambled graphics

[Room 34]

OK, well I don't believe it's an NTSC/PAL issue... my 7800 system and carts are all NTSC, and I am having the problem.

 

I think there must be something about the way carts for certain systems including Atari 7800, Colecovision, and NES were made that causes this sort of thing to happen.

 

Does anyone else know more about this than I do (that is, anything)?

[+rdemming]

quote:

---

Originally posted by pryme:

Goodday,

 

I just got my atari 7800 today, and I notice when playing 7800 carts, that there appear strange bands of characters at the bottom of the screen, flashing, moving fast...the rest of the screen is playable, just squashed I think abit verticaly. When I play 2600 games, there seems no problem. Just with the 7800 carts...(Astroids plays just fine)...Is it cuz of the difference in NTSC / Pal ?? I believe the carts are ntsc cuz I bought them from someone in the us...but, the screen is not roling or something...just that anoying large band of characters at the bottom...

 

maybe not a good insert?

 

anyone?

 

please??

 

thanks!

Marco

---

 

 

It seems that you are running NTSC carts on a PAL system. If Asteroids is build in the console than you have a PAL system. PAL games should have a small sticker with the letter P on the back of the cartridge.

 

Most NTSC games do not work (correctly) on PAL consoles. The random pixels in the bottom of the screen are because a PAL console displays more scanlines than NTSC consoles. I have this with my only NTSC game Centipede.

 

Robert

[Paul Slocum]

I believe the reason you never see anything like that on the 2600 is because the 2600 doesn't have any built in character set, graphics, or graphics memory. When one of those later systems screw up (usually due to dirty cartridge contacts in my experience) you see random bits of graphics memory (which often includes letters and numbers). I have seen Atari games with dirty contacts mess up, but you just get lines and colors since there's no graphics memory.

 

-Paul

[+Propane13]

Hey,

 

Graphics memory on the 7800 is a cool thing. Something you should never do is pull a 7800 cartridge from the cartridge slot, and then put it back in (without turning off power). When the cart's pulled away, the screen messes up, and audio hangs. When re-inserted, the audio is still mesed up, but the graphics fix themselves. Weird, but a bad idea, nonetheless.

 

-John K. Harvey