French RGB Consoles

 

Bonjour!

Since there seems to be quite an interest and great confusion about the special characteristics of french gaming machines, I wanted to give a quick rundown about this topic. Why the situation in France is so special and how different companies dealt with the conditions.

 

 

When black and white TV sets were relatively common in the mid-twentieth century, methods were researched to add color in a way that was backwards compatible to older sets. A monochrome set displays a picture by plotting dot for dot with only luminance information. Color sets operate in a similar way but with three sub-dots per “pixel” in the colors red, green and blue from which all other colors can be derived. There would have been several disadvantages at the time if the color signal would have been transmitted in such a way and first and formost there would have been no compatibility with older monochrome sets. To overcome this problem, the color signal was transmitted as a black and white signal with an additional layer of color with a lower resolution on top (chroma subsampling). A b/w set simply ignores the added color while a newer TV could utilise the added information to dye the picture with the provided colors. (This is where the composite and S-video signals come from and the seperation of luminace and lower resolution chroma is the main reason for the lower quality of these signals compared to RGB). PAL, NTSC and SECAM are the standards or “codecs” for this added color information.

Different countries chose different standards and the three competitors spread around the world, with SECAM gaining the smallest share (France and members of the Warsaw pact). If you connect a German or Italian NES (PAL50) to a true SECAM50 TV in France, it will only show a monochrome picture, because while it’s able to detect and display the underlying b/w portion of the composite signal, it can’t decode the PAL color information and thus ignores it. So, if a device shall be able to transmitt a signal via RF, composite or S-video, it must be able to encode for the region it is intended for. When it comes to video games this leads to customized hardware (like PPUs). Bad luck for the French who were the only relevant country for the industry at that time with a SECAM system. So… solutions had to be found.

 

2. RGB > SECAM
Like I said before, systems like SECAM, NTSC or PAL are only relevant as long as you use S-video, composite or RF. If you switch to RGB via SCART (also a French thing), you can connect a British SNES to a French TV and everything works, because both countries use a 50Hz and PAL or SECAM is of no relevance. (By the way: Most European TVs are multistandard since at least the 90ies and display 50 and 60Hz and all three systems via composite)

 

 

 

Atari 2600:We start of with the most interesting example. The Atari 2600 (or VCS) uses the “TIA” chip for color palettes and encoding and it exists in PAL and NTSC variants. While a SECAM-TIA was not considered profitable, the French got a 2600… a bad one. Besides the color mode the 2600 has a monochrome mode for compatibility to bw sets. In this mode the system displays everything in eight shades of grey. For the French version the engineers took PAL hardware and modified it to permanent monochrome mode. The monochrome signal was then put through a simple circuit which assigned a color value to each grey and added it in a way compatible to SECAM. The resulting picture was limited to said eight colors which where very flat and unpleasant. The system was not well received in France.

 

Atari 7800:When the 7800 hit the scene, SCART sockets were already quite common in Europe (especially in France) and TVs could easily be provided with a RGB signal. Unfortunatly the 7800 wasn’t able to put out RGB natively and so it was created artificially. Where other PAL-systems feed the composite signal to an RF-modulator, the French 7800 converts it to RGB instead in order to connect it to French TVs via SCART.
While it outputs RGB and might even produce a better picture than any other unmodded system via RF, the best picture quality it can produce is that of composite video – the conversion process might even damage the quality, which makes a system with composite video mod the preferable option. Because it’s RGB from a composite source after all. Connecting a VCR to an HDMI upscaler doesn’t make my VHS tapes HD either.

Atari Jaguar: Native RGB output

The systems by Sega proved to be the least complicated for the French at the time because nearly all of them provided native RGB output. That way standard PAL-systems could be shipped with a SCART cable instead of the standard RF solution. On some systems the RF-outputs were even covered with stickers or completely removed. There is only one exception in the Sega catalogue:

 

Master System II:The only non-RGB console Sega released in Europe is worth montioning here, because the version I got for christmas wouldn’t work in France, since it’s RF only and PAL. The version that reached France was a little different. It offers a real RGB out and was shipped with a SCART-cable, as you can see in the manual for the system (Attached). Since other MS2 can be modded to RGB easily, there would be no reason to convert a lesser signal to RGB for the French version and this output is considered native RGB.

 

All (European 50Hz) consoles by Nintendo offer native RGB output, except for two of them:

 

NES:The sought after “French NES” may be an interesting specimen, but is actually the same bluff as the 7800. A low standard composite to RGB conversion enables this PAL-B hardware to be seen on a French TV. The PPU of the NES is only capable of displaying composite and this signal is used for the conversion. Again: The French version doesn’t offer a better picture than any NES with composite video. It’s actually worse.

 

N64:And here is the biggest question mark of them all… the French N64.
While some early NTSC systems could be modded to output RGB by directing the video signal trough an additional circuit, the early French systems not only had the right DA converter (as the NTSC systems did) but had all the traces on the board for RGB output. While it’s lacking some necessary electronic components, they can easily be added and thus restore RGB functionality. It seems like Nintendo had RGB in mind for the French version (which came out AFTER the non-RGB PAL version) but dropped it during production in order to save money. At that time in 1997 most TVs in France were able to decode PAL signals as well as SECAM and it became less important to overcome the SECAM barrier. Later on the French model was replaced with the standard European Model NUS-001(EUR).

This list isn’t complete by far, since there are more consoles with unique french features, but these are the ones, the most people talk about.