Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Darco Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk Subject: Re: NTSC/PAL start-up convention? Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 17:37:04 -0400 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 51 Message-ID: <36081880.C9DA4042@bigfoot.com> References: <3607F5AA.60709B48@shell.jps.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 101.dialup.datasys.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (Win95; U) Elliott Lee wrote: > > Heya, > > Anyone interested in starting a convention for doing NTSC and PAL > initialization in their games? How are you handling this? > > The way I'm doing it right now is that one of the first routines that > is called (when a program starts) is an initialization routine which > checks to see if the user has held down the START button on pad 1. > Then based on that it either initializes in 320x240 NTSC or 320x256 > NTSC. The game is built around 320x240 NTSC, so PAL users shouldn't > see any clipping. (The screen can be recentered in an Options Menu > if there are problems.) It also initializes some other variables to > account for the 60 fps/50 fps problem. > > I'd rather not make two builds of the program and this way seems to > be working fine---I've been cross-testing on both NTSC and PAL. > I've decided for an upcoming project that having 2 different builds would be the most efficient method. It's a Mech battle game, in which you fight in a randomly generated terrain against the computer, or a friend. For the movements of the legs and stuff, I'm going to have a coordinate hirarchy(sp), consisting of the body, upper right leg, lower right leg, right foot, etc... To get realistic movements I'm going to have the program read the rotation value from a look-up table that will be generated at buildtime. What is really cool is that at buildtime, it looks at if the game is PAL(50hz) or NTSC(60hz) and then will automaticly create the lookup tables synced at either 50Hz or 60Hz. So there will be no difference in speed between the two games. It will have a full-screen pal conversion as well. So hopefuly, I will have a perfect PAL conversion. The most streamlined way to make a PAL conversion is to have 2 different builds. It's easy enough just to do this in codewarrior -- just have a NTSC target and a PAL target. You can do the same using makefiles with GCC. In fact, it is alot more flexible using MAKE... But not as easy to implement. BTW: I've never tried this, I'm not even sure if this function is supported by the net yaroze libs, but couldn't you ask for input from the computer what video mode to be in using scanf()? Now this function probably isn't supported and I'm gona get alot of flack for saying this without checking, but it's just a random thought. 'Darco