An NTSC Atari looks good on a PAL TV. How come?

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 09:06:03PM +1300, Terry Stewart via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> I'm assuming it's because composite input into "relatively" modern can handle
> NTSC and PAL? Is this a reasonable thought? The UAV is not an NTSC converter,
> and even the inventor was surprised this worked.

PAL is the superset of analogue TV standards. If one is building a TV which
already contains the expensive components required to decode PAL, tweaking the
constants to also decode NTSC is cheap and economies of scale may make it
cheaper than to make the set PAL-only.

It's been about 20 years since I last saw a nominally PAL TV which couldn't
also decode NTSC.