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Comment by hyakosm | Hacker News Reader

In France we had a different color system (SÉCAM), while the other european countries were in PAL, but French TV were required to have a Péritel/SCART entry by law, offering RGB input. So the french NES was basically the european PAL version with an extra PAL to RGB converter.

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Don't forget MESECAM and PAL-M and the other crazy things we had to deal with in the bad old days. There was one standard (PAL-M I think) that was not NTSC but the difference from NTSC was so slight that you could slap an PAL-M sticker* on an NTSC recording, and the PAL-M tape machine would play it back just fine.

* The power of that sticker was amazing! ;P

Brazil used PAL-M. NTSC on a PAL+M would give you B&W video and it was possible to convert the equipment (the VCR) by changing the frequency offset of the color carrier.

An NTSC tape would play in black and white on a pure PAL-M system. PAL-M was the Brazilian system, created to conform to the 60Hz mains but having the improved colour encoding of PAL.

Before colour TVs, Brazil used the American 60Hz System M (B&W predecessor of NTSC), so when it came time to adopt colour they couldn't choose the European PAL because it would not be compatible with current B&W TV sets, and they didn't want to adopt NTSC* because by then it was clear it was an inferior colour encoding, so they slapped a PAL colour encoding on top of a SystemM B&W signal, resulting in a 525 lines 60Hz without NTSC colour distortions (kinda best of both worlds).

* Also they didn't want to adopt NTSC because they wanted to prop the national electronics industry, so a home made standard meant local TV makers didn't have to compete with imported TV sets.

Wait a minute: we had SCART in the Netherlands too, but it supported both composite (CVBS) and RGB.

In fact, if you had a composite device (with the yellow, red and black plugs), you could just get one of those cheap passive adapters to hook it up to SCART: https://media.s-bol.com/mwVL1yR45z6E/1144x1200.jpg

IIRC our childhood (Philips) TV had two SCART inputs: one supported both RGB and CVBS, the other only CVBS.

Traditionally, TV with two SCART had one with RGB + CVBS and the other with S-Video + CVBS.

Wait what!? There was a French pal RGB nes?

AFAIK the French NES is just a PAL console with an added composite-to-RGB converter. Although it outputs RGB signals, the quality is no better than composite.

That's interesting thanks

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