Apple II on PAL?

[adric22]

Sorry if this has been asked already. I've been searching around on
Google and haven't really found an answer to this. I live in North
America and I am mostly a Commodore guy. But I've been reading about
how the Apple II video chip was designed to display color by using
NTSC tricks. So then I began to wonder if the Apple II was sold in
Europe and how it worked on PAL systems.

[BLuRry]

The PAL version has slightly different circuitry to handle PAL. In
order to accommodate the timing differences (50hz vs 60hz) there is a
timing difference onboard to accommodate that as well. In order to
have PAL color, it required an additional card -- otherwise it was a
monochrome affair.

http://www.applefritter.com/node/23779

Having said that, it was a rather interesting thing for me living in
the Netherlands for 8 months with an American NTSC model (and NTSC
monitor) running on 50hz power. We had to replace the power supply on
the //e after a month to a euro 220v supply -- and still have that in
a box somewhere, but otherwise no other issues.

-B

[adric22]

> In order to
> have PAL color, it required an additional card -- otherwise it was a
> monochrome affair.

So this card provided color on a PAL system, was it compatible with
existing software on the Apple II that used color? Also, did it have
the same color-bleeding issues that the NTSC versions had?

[Ewen]

adric22 <adr...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> So this card provided color on a PAL system, was it compatible with
> existing software on the Apple II that used color? Also, did it have
> the same color-bleeding issues that the NTSC versions had?

The non-American Apple II was not PAL in itself. It just came with a 240
volt supply, and had the timing slightly adjusted to suit. It still
output NTSC natively, and needed some form of modulator, such as the PAL
card, to give colour output to PAL monitors. In my experience, it did
not work too well.

The non-American //c had a different power brick, and came with an
optional plug in PAL modulator.

It was only with the PAL //e, that we got a true PAL Apple II, as the
motherboard we had was entirely different, with the AUX memory slot in a
different place.

The IIgs reverted to an NTSC only computer, but as it had RGB output
that we could feed into a SCART control or a monitor, this did not
matter.

Cheers - Ewen

[William Ogilvie]

Apple did make an Apple II for the European market that generated PAL or Secam video. I bought a partly populated ( no dynamic RAM or ROMs) in 1982. I don't know how well it worked with PAL or Secam monitors. As-is with a monochrome NTSC monitor, the video rolled both ways. Several people I knew tried to convert their boards to NTSC. One guy even sold me a nice big blueprint schematic. I duplicated the video/refresh circuit on a protoboard and experimented with it. I eventually got it to work with an NTSC monitor, but never saw what color looked like. I don't know what the story was about these boards. They nay not have worked well with Euro monitors.