60Hz on a VA9 Saturn

[themanfromsaturn]

I recently modified my VA9 board Saturn console by adding a 50/60Hz toggle via a PIC and the reset button, i.e the 'switchless' approach.

In order to do the toggling, I lifted pin 79 on the VDP2 chip and soldered it to the appropriate pin on the PIC.

So far this seems to work and I can toggle between 50Hz and 60Hz, but it is always PAL. Looking at various guides my understanding is to either do what I did and lift pin 79, or to cut traces to isolate the other ICs to prevent it from operating in NTSC mode.

My question is, is there any reason I would not want to run the system in PAL mode all the time? The system also has a region free BIOS, so if I play Japanese or US games, should those be played in NTSC mode at 60Hz and not PAL 60Hz?

[zyrobs]

The system doesn't care if you use NTSC or PAL output (ie. colour encoding in the video output). It only cares if the VDP2 is in 50Hz or 60Hz mode, that will determine the max lines on screen and the refresh rate. If you set the unit to 60Hz, then your Japanese games will play fine in 60Hz.

The little text in the BIOS settings will only change from PAL to NTSC if you reboot (not sure if a reset will change it).

Changing the PAL/NTSC colour encoding will only affect the composite video signal, and PAL is higher quality in that regards. It won't make a difference if you use RGB Scart, and most TVs can accept PAL60 so there's no point in changing the output to NTSC. The PAL/NTSC encoding is done after the Saturn finishes generating the video output and passes it on to the video encoder, so the games aren't even aware which colour encoding you use.

[themanfromsaturn]

Ah, I see. Thanks, that makes sense now. It brings me to another question on the thread about my modded 50/60Hz Japanese system (I will post it there).

[zyrobs]

Is this VA9 system originally PAL or JP? They are very rare in Japanese machines, I've only seen them in V-Saturns and Hi-Saturns. For PAL they make up most of the model 2s though.