Converting Japanese PSone to PAL

Post by **KarimPolska** » October 3rd, 2024, 10:10 pm

Hi guys,

Got many consoles from Japan and having tons of issues modding them.

As there is no shortcut to get them to read PAL retails nor backups i had to replace the bios...

Now the new bios from a pal donor pu-41 boots in black and white while the signal is cutting off...

https://youtu.be/IWEstgp8jAI

Any solution?

Post by **KarimPolska** » January 8th, 2025, 10:46 am

Cant believe that non of my threads get any replies at all.

Post by **MasterLink** » January 8th, 2025, 11:28 am

Mainly because I don't actually know the answer to this question. I can give you an educated guess based on other systems I've worked with.

For the image being cut off, that might just be your TV's overscan setting perhaps? As for black and white, the color subcarrier is wrong (basically, and this is a guess, you might be outputting something like NTSC-50, not PAL, which not many things actually support except old American TV's with a vertical hold knob). But, I'm not qualified to answer this.

Even my American SCPH-5501 when put in PAL mode, is black and white and looks identical to yours despite my bedroom TV being multi-standard capable. It just can't decode the color burst at all, it's basically incoherent to it.

Basically, there's more to it than a software switch to go from NTSC to PAL, there's a color burst frequency as well since you're using baseband video (composite). If you used RGB however, it *will* be in color. That much I can confirm. But still with the cropping, if it's not the TV, someone else will need to chime in.

Again, I could be wrong as I simply don't know the PS1's video output quite like I do with most 8 and 16-bit platforms which is why I refrained from answering. I'd rather be silent than give the wrong answer.