ZX Vega +


Should be okay, I think. Back in the day 8-bit machine only really differed in their PSU input voltage and graphics modes. The NTSC type signal is 420p so US machines were limited to around 400 horizontal lines going down, while PAL units had the full 512 lines on a 576p signal. Because the frame rate is slower on a link that carries exactly the same bandwidth, you can squeeze in more pixels when the clock's running slower. Presumably that means one or other of us wasn't using square pixels (I think it's the europeans as the screen resolution I just looked up was 4x5, not 3x4. That's for a european derived model though (the BBC Micro), and wikipedia suggests european users got the same resolutions as USians with slower speeds and presumably black bars because of the lack of lines going over the slackened RF interface. But then wikipedia doesn't mention the US modes of the BBC micro I know about, so perhaps it just forgot to mention the Euro modes for the C64. It does say the CPU was clocked slower on Euro C64, presumably because they had longer to prepare the next frame for display. On the BBC micro they kept the CPU the same between different markets as far as I can tell, but just cropped the graphics instead.
 
I had PAL computers back in the day - we didn't get black bars. We used the power frequency for frame timing (at least on the Speccy). Later for games for machines such as the Amiga, NTSC games had a black region at the bottom of the screen due to the missing lines - Europeans got 320x256 lowres, USA got 320x200.
 
Well, this wasn't meant to hijack the conversation to discuss the TheC64 mini in a ZX Vega+ Posting, more was the concern about RCL vs RGL being tied to one another. I wasn't aware they would be considered separate entities or if they were under the same troubled umbrella. All that aside, financially they may be in good shape, but the question is whether or not they'll remain legally in good shape after all of this is over and what the future of that particular line of products might mean as a result, especially if Paul Andrews is the same for both under Andrews Ltd. The concern is how the Vega+ debacle is being handled and how it will affect the individuals involved, really.

All that aside, I can run NTSC and PAL games on mine just fine, PAL seems to run at a slightly higher framerate with slightly higher pitch audio but is still very playable. In fact, a lot of games I run actually have to be in PAL mode in order to resolve display corruption. It's an interesting software quirk, but this is the kind of thing that I expected the engineers that build these products would be aware of, and this is why I think the Vega+ product needs to be handed to a different development team so they can actually produce a viable functional product instead of dragging their feet and letting this become a legal issue
 
But the Vega(or the +) doesn't emulate a Timex, it emulates a Spectrum. There is literally no problem there regarding NTSC and PAL, as there were simply no NTSC games available for the Spectrum.
 
If anybody has an hour and a half to kill, this video goes through the whole vega+ scandal / dramarama in excruciating detail.

 
And that video's been removed. I have a copy of it if anyone's interested, but am not sure at present how to share such big files (1.6GB) without signing up for too much crap.
 
To me, it seems to make clear that the sales department fell out with the technies who actually made stuff, who said 'well, if you want to make it, go ahead' and walked. The sales department started desperately spinning stories, because that's all they're really trained to do, but ended up only sending out old prototypes when they couldn't actually make anything newer.

You can argue over whether they're salespeople or fraudsters, but really, left to their own devices in my experience the distinction is largely academic.
 
levi said:
You can argue over whether they're salespeople or fraudsters, but really, left to their own devices in my experience the distinction is largely academic.
Click to expand...
Our sales department seemed not quite as bad as the marketing department. But calling which was worse is like picking between two US presidental candidates. :)
 
levi said:
And that video's been removed. I have a copy of it if anyone's interested, but am not sure at present how to share such big files (1.6GB) without signing up for too much crap.
Click to expand...
You could upload it back to YouTube, and mark it as private, then post the link. Then unless they're reading here, they won't find it
 
The community tab on his channel has an explanation and the video will be re-uploaded it seems.
...So, why am I deleting it? Well, a video like this was always gonna cause a little controversy and about 30 minutes after it went live I got a privacy complaint from an unknown individual. The time stamps given all show the same person and I was asked to fix it within 48 hours or YouTube will step in to asses the situation. This wound me up because even if I did blur out this persons face, it would had still been pretty obvious who it was. In my opinion the whole thing was a scare tactic in hope that the video will be removed from my (almost) 100,000 subscriber Channel... ...And I'm gonna do just that! Remove it from a 100K channel and re-upload it onto a channel 3x my size :p "Hello You"...
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
...this video goes through the whole vega+ scandal / dramarama in excruciating detail.
Click to expand...
Seems like that video was already outdated anyway :D
 
So, if I'm reading this right, the feature-length video doesn't even cover half of the things that happened? This should be fun...
 
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