I recently bought a boxed Amiga CD32 in excellent condition, and found out (a bit too late) that it wasn’t a PAL version, but a NTSC one. The CD32 was only briefly available in NTSC territory (Canada), and very few games were ever released for it. As I had already spent time and money on recapping it, as well as removed the protective plastic film from the CD32 label and CD reader window, returning it wasn’t much of an option.

Removal of plastic film

I tried connecting a mouse to it, and through the boot menu changing the video mode to PAL, but as that (obviously) doesn’t change the components on the PCB the frequency of the video output is still 60 Hz instead of the 50 Hz required for PAL, so the image is presented in black and white instead of color. More investigations were needed. Continue reading →