Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Alex Herbert Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.2d_graphics Subject: Re: NTSC TV Trouble post script Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1998 14:58:54 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 29 Message-ID: <361E169D.585EBA75@ndirect.co.uk> References: <6vgfkk$rda17@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <6vggsr$rda18@chuka.playstation.co.uk> Reply-To: aherbert@ndirect.co.uk NNTP-Posting-Host: th-usr00-39.ndirect.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; I) Hi. This is quite normal, but it depends on the TV as to how much of the picture is cropped. I do some work with TV advertising which sheds some light on the matter. The broadcast standards say that digital images for PAL should be 720x576, and NTSC should be 640x480. But, it should be noted that upto 10% of the picture may be cropped. When this is translated to non-interlaced modes, there should be 288 lines for PAL and 240 lines for NTSC. As you can see, the PlayStation meets the NTSC standards quite nicely, but even in the 256 line PAL modes, the picture is somewhat short. This means that in PAL modes, very little virtical cropping will occur. In fact, on most TVs you can see the black boarders above and below the displayed area. If you were to see a PSX running in the USA or Japan, you would not see these borders. So, to sum up, cropping is normal, and you should make sure that nothing which is critical to your game falls into the outer 10% of the display area. This applies to PAL aswell, but you should remember that it's 10% of 288 lines, not 10% of 256. Does that answer the question at all? Herbs