"System A" was a 405-line TV system used in the UK and Ireland up until just about 1985. Never had color, although there were experiments with all three established analog color encodings.
This puts its extinction just a little after the beginning of the personal computing and video gaming hardware.
So, has anyone heard of any late 1970s / early 1980s hardware that used a 405-line TV set as its monitor, instead of generating NTSC or PAL?
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It occurs to me that the 2600 should be flexible enough to be adapted to generate 405-line video, since the CPU is responsible for generating the video timings. You could start with an NTSC stella IC, use a ≈2.3MHz clock instead of the normal ≈3.6MHz one, and then "just" generate 160 active scanlines (out of 203 total). The TVs are monochrome anyway, so the chrominance output wouldn't be very interesting anyway.
This puts its extinction just a little after the beginning of the personal computing and video gaming hardware.
So, has anyone heard of any late 1970s / early 1980s hardware that used a 405-line TV set as its monitor, instead of generating NTSC or PAL?
—
It occurs to me that the 2600 should be flexible enough to be adapted to generate 405-line video, since the CPU is responsible for generating the video timings. You could start with an NTSC stella IC, use a ≈2.3MHz clock instead of the normal ≈3.6MHz one, and then "just" generate 160 active scanlines (out of 203 total). The TVs are monochrome anyway, so the chrominance output wouldn't be very interesting anyway.