An effect of PAL versus NTSC…

Just a quick note about my Optimizing Color BASIC series…

In later installments, I started doing some benchmarking using BASIC’s TIMER command. TIMER returns an incrementing count value that is based on the 60hz TV sync. At 60hz, the timer counts to 60 approximately every second.

I have been doing my tests in the XRoar emulator, which was created to emulate the Dragon, a CoCo clone manufactured in England. Over there, their TV systems are 50hz, so the Dragon and UK versions of the CoCo operate using a different TV sync rate.

Thus, in Dragon/UK mode, TIMER counts up to 50 every second.

And by default, XRoar starts up in PAL mode.

So it’s likely that some of the TIMER values I have given have been off, because I may have been running in PAL/50hz mode sometime.

So if you catch any, let me know and I will go back and retest and correct. I already did that in a recent part, but I may have missed others.

Mea culpa.

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