Why does the Euzebox work at all?

[NoOne]

I have both a Fuzebox from adafruit and an Euzebox (like both very much! ), but theres one thing I dont understand:
Why does the Euzebox work on a PAL TV? I thought it outputs 60/30? fps and what about the difference of total scan lines?
Am I seeing this right, there are black lines in between?

Thanks for explaining ...

[greenpower]

Hi,
The Euzebox doesn't work in a PAL-only TV. The thing is that it outputs bare RGB singals through the SCART plug to the TV, so if the TV is NTSC-capable it will output video clearly. Normally all new TV's come with NTSC capabilyties.
Hope that helps.

[NoOne]

Hm ... but I think my TV can't handle NTSC.
When I connect my Fuzebox via S-Video or CVBS I only get B/W images and theres no NTSC option in any menu.

Beside that I noticed the image of the Euzebox is slightly shifted left:

IMG_0045.jpg (74.5 KiB) Viewed 5980 times

[NoOne]

On the first photo is a CRT and on the second a plasma TV.
The Fuzebox works great on the plasma.

IMG_0046.jpg (75.89 KiB) Viewed 5974 times

[uze6666]

Saw that kind of left shift before...it was the TV that could not handle the "special" NTSC timing produced by the Uzebox kernel. AFAIK, there's not much one can do about it.

[greenpower]

Can you tell me the names of both TVs? Brand, model, ect. I could search some info and help you!

[NoOne]

The first one is a Metz 6347 CRT, second a Panasonic TX-P50STW50 Plasma and I've tested it on a third CRT from Hitachi where it worked perfectly.

[Harty123]

I have both a Fuzebox from adafruit and an Euzebox (like both very much! ), but theres one thing I dont understand:
Why does the Euzebox work on a PAL TV? I thought it outputs 60/30? fps and what about the difference of total scan lines?
Am I seeing this right, there are black lines in between?

Thanks for explaining ...

Fuzebox (and of course also the Uzebox) and EUzebox requires both a TV set with NTSC. Otherwise the Fusebox will produce a BW picture and the EUzebox a coloured picture with wrong colors and/or shifted pictures. Most modern LCD and LED TV's can handle PAL and NTSC. Sometimes the chipsets inside this TV's have problems with the low resolution and timing of the video signals of the E/Uzebox...

I have here 2 new LED TV's and an older LCD from different manufacturers (Sony, Philips and Samsung) - it works with all three TV's without problems.

We will add your TV's to the black list in the wiki. Pls send me the article number of the Hitachi CRT for the white list...

-Harty

[uze6666]

Btw, it's worth noting that this is not a problem specific to the Uzebox, try pluging in old NES, SNES or Genesis and you'll probably end up with the same issue. I think it has to do with the fact that all those and the Uzebox use timing with 524 scanlines instead of 525 lines like the official spec.

[Janka]

The picture is shifted left because NTSC video timing has a line length of 63.5µs with 10µs line blanking while PAL video timing has a line length of 64µs with 12µs line blanking. TV sets usually set up picture width and position by the quotient of these values. So on a PAL TV set the picture is OK when the quotient is 5.33. When you feed NTSC timing to a PAL TV set, the quotient is 6.35, which is about 120% of the expected value. That's why the picture is 20% wider and shifted 10% to the left.

Shouldn't be much of a problem, though. Most post-1990 PAL TV sets can handle PAL-60, which has similar timing as NTSC, just a different color burst and the special PAL trick against color distortion - through Scart RGB, no problem because all the PAL decoding is bypassed then. Post-2000 PAL TV sets are often fully NTSC capable so the original Uzebox would work.