PC Engine AV mod

[Joe Redifer]

Also in Europe they are used to RGB for almost everything.  They don't have to put up with composite.

Mike... I suppose it is possible that my Magician Lord cart was abused at some point by someone, looks to be in good shape, though.  And my Fatal Fury 2 came from Japan and was in pristine shape.  What kind of abuse would cause this?  They don't interfere with gameplay, only with displays on the screen, and then only a small part of the display.

[Keranu]

Also in Europe they are used to RGB for almost everything.  They don't have to put up with composite.

As Mike said, it's probably because they don't want to stick with crappy PAL.

[Joe Redifer]

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

[Michael Helgeson]

Well,Sometimes the carts look fine but the cases can be heavy damaged. This can give in to clues like the game being dropped,inside the case,causing shock damage. I had a Jap FF2 cart that was like this. I had  a Sengoku MVS that was average looking,but the box took alot of damage. The cart had same probs as FF2 did,pixels in certain area of screen and never goes away. Very annoying. I figured it was prob dropped alot in its box. other cart like this was a AES Sengoku,with no case and def abuse all over it. The case held up,but I think shock just wore it down. It worked,but same probs as above,but in diff area of screen.

[Michael Helgeson]

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

No,not that I am aware of,unless the tv will do NTSC and PAL. Pal is 625-line/50 Hz,and so unless the tv they are using will display 525-line/60 Hz NTSC in full color,it ain't gonna happen. There are tv monitors that will do both,but are expensive last I checked. Otherwise it is not typical and the majority can not do this. This is why high end Laser Disc players released in the UK that could play Pal and NTSC disc used scart support to run the NTSC disc in RGB,and this was the only way they would play without problems. The problems with this was that LD was designed around anolog composite and the conversion to RGB ended up actually looking worse. It basically was a feature on high end Pal players to allow them a way to play NTSC movies because in the UK they didn't get near the selection Asia and the USA got. Composite was out of the question because Pal tvs did not do NTSC 60hz signal trough RF, composite or s-video.

[Joe Redifer]

How would this affect certain pixels in only certain areas, I wonder?  I would think because the Neo is getting a bad connection to some part of the cart, but I guess that's not the case.  I wish the carts were smaller than a VHS cassette and would be less susceptible to this type of thing, but back then they were big so they'd impress wimpy Genesis and SNES users compared to their tiny carts.

[Michael Helgeson]

Shock from being dropped can damage rom chips. Ive trown Genesis EA sports titles against the wall when I managed a game store,back when I would get bored,and they would still look fine,but wouldn't work after trying to boot them up.

[Joe Redifer]

Oh yeah?  Well I've cried, screamed, thrown tantrums all the while stomping my foot on a Genesis cartridge to crack it open.  Cart worked fine for being smashed by such a baby. 

[Michael Helgeson]

Yea back when 7th Saga came out on Snes my friend Alex rented it from Blockbuster. He totally hated it so we trew it over and over again at the kitchen floor,submerged it hot water and tried it couple days later and it still worked,even held its saves,amazing stuff. Still hate that game myself.

Problem with all this is you cant compare Genesis to Neo Geo in ability to damage fairly,cause most Genesis carts had very few chips on the pcb to damage,where as a Neo Cart used much much more and 2 pcbs. This doesn't mean Neo Carts were built cheaply,but I mean in terms of abuse,if you have more parts to abuse,you have more chances of causing damage chip wise or pcb wise.

Question? Since you had a Unibios did you ever do a rom check on your glitch carts? I was thinking the Unibios can check for bad roms?

Also,there are a fer MVS carts that have graphics bugs no matter what. Fatal Fury 1,in the backgrounds,and Ninja Commando as the game scrolls upwards are a couple of good examples. There are others that have probs,but those always stick fresh in my memory the most.

[Joe Redifer]

I only have one MVS cart that is a conversion.  The rest are AES.  Is the "ROM check" where you hold A, B and D at startup?  I'm sure I've tried it, but I don't know if I've done that on those two carts.  Magician Lord is cheap, so it shouldn't be hard to get one to replace it, probably brand new even.  I have no desire to replace Fatal Fury 2 since I feel the PC Engine SCD version is much more playable.  They could have secured those PCBs inside the cart better.  Lots of people don't know that they are supposed to rattle around like a cheap Chinese product.  Not even sure why they need two PCBs.

Also KPJ ever charged me much for what he did, and all he asks is that I pay shipping on this current problem.

[Michael Helgeson]

Thats really good of him then if he wont charge to fix it.I don't know him personally,from what I do know he sounds better then Dean and Kurtz when it comes to quality work,but I have also heard that at pricing he is the most evil bastard out there which is why I recommended contacting the other 2 first..

Like I said,also,the 2 consolized 1-slots I fixed,they coulda been KPJ stuff,or even ArcadeKingdom. At that time period I only knew of KPJ consolizing 1-slots and actually selling them.

If KPJ fixes the prob for you,you should give him some extra kudos for it on the Neo forums,because I'm sure he could use it there. Most of the bad stuff said about him I ever read originated there. It could be the bios went bad. Wouldn't be the first time its happened. wire coulda came loose too. Who knows.

Umm as far as the rom test,I'm not sure how to access it,but I read the Unibios does it. I never used them before. I'm pretty stuck on not altering hardware more then necessary so changing out the bios on a Neo is not something I'm willing to do. Even if its on a socketed MVS board,I just wont do it because I don't care to.

[Joe Redifer]

The Universe Bios kicks ass.  Gives every game a sound test feature!  The way he did it (just by my looking at it) was to solder a socket on top of an existing chip (original BIOS chip?) and then put the Universe Bios into that socket.  Nothing seems out of whack or disconnected or shorting that I can see.

[ccovell]

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

No,not that I am aware of,unless the tv will do NTSC and PAL. Pal is 625-line/50 Hz...

PAL and NTSC are actually just the colour encoding standards.  There are such things as PAL-60 and PAL-50 (the more common broadcast standard).  My Super Play magazine from 1992 mentions how many TVs being sold can handle SCART as well as 60Hz video, so I'm sure there were TVs that could handle 60Hz in Europe in the 90s.  Even if a TV couldn't handle NTSC encoding, it could still display it as a 60hz greyscale video signal.

I'm surprised how many people here are trying to shoot holes in the superiority of RGB.  Let's not get carried away and imagine what the developers' "intentions" were when they drew their graphics.  I have a PC-Engine promotional video here that shows developers at Hudson working on games such as Tengai Makyou, and the graphics artists used computers with a graphic editor on-screen, and a second video monitor beside it for previewing.  Let's also not forget about the PC-Engine that was built into a computer monitor and sold in Japan; I'm sure that is connected directly via RGB.  Thus, PCE hardware WAS sold with RGB output as standard in some cases.

[Michael Helgeson]

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

No,not that I am aware of,unless the tv will do NTSC and PAL. Pal is 625-line/50 Hz...

PAL and NTSC are actually just the colour encoding standards.  There are such things as PAL-60 and PAL-50 (the more common broadcast standard).  My Super Play magazine from 1992 mentions how many TVs being sold can handle SCART as well as 60Hz video, so I'm sure there were TVs that could handle 60Hz in Europe in the 90s.  Even if a TV couldn't handle NTSC encoding, it could still display it as a 60hz greyscale video signal.

My answer to all of that is:

PAL and NTSC are actually just the colour encoding standards. 

There is more involved then color encoding,the resolution is different as is the screen refresh rate. This is one of the reasons why older game systems displayed in letterbox type format in Pal and ran at 50 frames per second instead of 60 FPS and full screen.

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

No,not that I am aware of,unless the tv will do NTSC and PAL. Pal is 625-line/50 Hz,and so unless the tv they are using will display 525-line/60 Hz NTSC in full color,it ain't gonna happen. There are tv monitors that will do both,but are expensive last I checked. Otherwise it is not typical and the majority can not do this.

The majority being tvs made and sold from late 80ies untill mid to late 90ies that do not support NTSC 60hz and def not Pal-60 as a feature.


Pal-60 did not begin use in Tvs until the DVD era and Dreamcast era gaming wise and was actually originally intended for DVD use,not games,and its not the typical broadcast standard there still nor is it the standard for game systems,as there are still titles released that do not support it,and even the Wii VC doesn't use Pal-60.( It can do it but no one uses the function )

I can not confirm myself that Pal-60 does or does not work with composite or S-Video NTSC 60hz signal old ass game systems.
People I talked to in the UK about laserdisc stuff told me it may not work,so I can not comment on this by experience.

NTSC/60Hz capable PAL Tvs were not common until mid 90ies in europe and still not totally mainstream. The UK mag 3DO Magazine used to have ads for the best ones available I had ever seen. There were expensive RGB SCART monitors sold before then that did accept NTSC video input along with Pal,but RGB scart monitors sold like this were not sold or marketed as normal Pal 50hz tvs. RGB isn't the same thing as Pal,and Scart is a play on RGB and does the same thing when the scart cable carries the RGB signals. Scart also carries other signals,audio,composite ect ect...

If possible,can you dig up the ads you have,and scan and post them? That would be cool to look at .

[FM-77]

There isn't a single modern PAL TV that cannot handle NTSC flawlessly. Maybe the really, really cheap and tiny ones, but nobody uses those other than in the kitchen anyway. Pretty much every PS2/GC, etc game is playable in PAL and PAL60 mode, the latter which is a really good standard (60Hz, but PAL color encoding).

Can't their TVs do 60Hz using composite?  I believe they can.

Yep. No problems there. The TV will automatically switch over to NTSC mode whenever it gets that signal if you're using composite or RGB.

S-video is pretty much unsupported here. Many TVs won't take the signal at all, it just gets converted to composite. Sometimes one of the two scart connectors are s-video compliant, but you'll need a scart - rca/s-video converter (a little box thing that you plug in, can be bought for about 5 bucks) in order to be able to connect the s-video cable.