15 Jul
2001
15 Jul
'01
5:33 a.m.
On Jul 15, 7:48, charles hobbs wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
> Over here, I'd recoment getting a BBC Micro.
I lucked out at a flea market about 10 years ago and
found one for $15 or
so. It had a US style plug, so I figured it would work fine "over here".
It
did, with a few caveats:
1. Unlike US micros, which had a TV output on Channels 3 or 4, the
BBC output RF on UHF (Channel 37 or something like that). Of course,
the channel numbers and frequencies used in the US are different than
those in the UK.
2. It still outputs a 625-line screen, which my 525-line US TV can only
display a part of (some lines off the top and bottom are missing)
3. It outputs PAL color, so a NTSC TV will get a monochrome picture
(It also supports direct RGB output, so, theoretically, I could wire a
cable
that would connect it to a monitor, fixing all of
those problems)
In a way, you're unlucky -- you have a bit of an oddity. Acorn did sell
BBC Micros in the States, but the ones officially shipped had a number of
modifications: 110V PSU, VHF modulator instead of UHF, 525-line 60Hz video
instead of 625-line 50Hz, "COLOR" keyword in BASIC instead of
"COLOUR".
I can't remember if they changed the colour subsystem to do NTSC instead of
PAL. I think that's unlikely as it would have involved changing the PCB;
the changes I know about only required changed to the ROM.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York