Trouble with PAL N64

[EgillH]

Hi,
So far I’m loving my OSSC being able to output NTSC consoles in all modes including 5x at 1980×1080 and 1600×1200.
PAL games however do not work in 1600X1200 mode which is a problem because when I play optimized PAL games in 1080p and 720p like Banjo Tooie, Conker, Mario Party 2 which have their black boarders removed I am losing a bunch of picture on top and bottom, some of those games also look a bit fuzzy but I might be able to fix that with some tweaks.
Any ideas for getting PAL to work in 1600X1200 mode or in 3x 5x without losing picture on top and bottom?

Thanks 🙂

[EgillH]

Mario 64 an Mario Kart work fine. Im guessing that the part of the picture that gets cut are just the PAL black boarders were left untouched.

[Steo]

It’s because PAL is 288p and it doesn’t multiply into a standard resolution like 240p does. At 4x PAL would be 1152p VS NTSC 960p, so technically if 4x works then you’d have a higher chance of getting the entire window on screen.

And it’s almost 1200p which 5x gets you on NTSC.

[EgillH]

Yeah I know about the difference in resolution. Just asking if someone has found a good solution, so far no luck with 4x in PAL… 🙁

[Steo]

Put it in 4x and then set your H Active to 1920, V Active to 270 (you lose 18p from the top and bottom which are still likely just black borders on pal anyway), H Samplerate to 2200 and V Backporch to about 28. That works for me and my PAL game literally has a 1 pixel tall black border on the top and bottom of the game. It’s basically perfection 🙂

You’ll need to set your TV’s aspect to 4:3 also.

EDIT: The other way to try if you find the aspect ratio wrong is to go up to H Samplerate 2460 and then set both H synclen and H Backporch values to about 215 to centre the image

[EgillH]

Dude thanks you are my hero!!!
Just one thing to get the apect ratio a 100% my ossc h.samplerate only goes to 2300. Cant seem to get it to 2460.
Well it looks great anyways 😀

[nmalinoski]

Which firmware are you running? 0.82 was released recently and upped some parameter limits.

[Steo]

Yeah as nmalinoski says you will need 0.82. That will allow the H Samplerate to go as high as 2800 instead. Glad you got it to work though 🙂

[Harrumph]

That’s a great tip for 1080p 50Hz from PAL consoles, I’ll add it to the tips & tweaks thread!
Odd that I never checked that myself (I do very rarely play 50Hz material anymore though).

[EgillH]

I think I have 0,82… I’ll check when I get home 🙂
I had tried this setting myself doing 4×270=1080 since it only makes sense but I never got a picture because my H.samplerate was way off and probably my h.pixels also. You need some time to wrap your head around all the tweaks and settings but once you do the OSSC is amazing 🙂

[Steo]

Yeah that’s the thing. While my computer monitor is stupid because it doesn’t sync to the refresh rate properly and only allows fixed ones, I can still use it to test settings as it accepts basically anything you throw at it. I used that and my spare 1080p Samsung TV to figure that one out and it accepted the mode as 1080p. It just came to me that 288(x4)=1152 so by decreasing that to 270(x4)=1080 you would get 1080p. Of course by default it’s going to be 1280×1080 which a TV is very unlikely to accept and that’s why you need the H Active and H Samplerate adjusted to make it into 1920×1080. PAL has always been pretty awful for me on the OSSC and now that I figured that out, it’s actually really good on compatible displays and scales really nicely 🙂

I’m not sure if the whole 270 thing has been done before and it probably has, but I figured that out without trying to search. The only other way I had seen for PAL was 3x with H Active 240, but that way you’re losing 48 lines of vertical detail whereas with the way I said it, you’re getting 4x and only losing 18 lines of detail which likely consist of slight black borders anyway on PAL systems.

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