{"id":90,"date":"2009-10-15T00:38:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-15T00:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/?page_id=90"},"modified":"2012-06-23T16:42:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-23T16:42:36","slug":"atari-7800","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/?page_id=90","title":{"rendered":"Atari 7800"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Unable to play NTSC carts on PAL systems, and vice versa<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Due to the fiasco surrounding the unlicensed pornographic title Custer&#8217;s Revenge on the Atari 2600, Atari put a lot more thought into a system that would only allow games that they deemed appropriate able to run on their system. To this end, they invented a digital signature protection method, which prevented unauthorized 7800 games from being played on the system. How it basically worked was that the 7800 would look at a cartridge when loaded, and calculate a checksum based on the ROM code and a secret signing key known only to Atari. It would then compare the result with a stored value on the cartridge. If the two did not match, the cartridge would not boot in 7800 mode, falling back instead to the 2600 backwards-compatibility mode on the console, the logic being if it wasn&#8217;t a valid 7800 title it must therefore be a 2600 game.<\/p>\n<p>However, they decided not to include this &#8220;feature&#8221; on the PAL 7800, instead using various heuristics to determine the cart type, due to the United States having export restrictions on anything involving cryptography at the time. As a result, PAL and NTSC 7800 games are fundamentally incompatible with each other &#8211; the only way to play NTSC 7800 games on a PAL television is with an NTSC console. So few games were produced for the system a modchip was never made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unable to play NTSC carts on PAL systems, and vice versa Due to the fiasco surrounding the unlicensed pornographic title Custer&#8217;s Revenge on the Atari 2600, Atari put a lot more thought into a system that would only allow games that they deemed appropriate able to run on their system. To this end, they invented [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/90"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/90\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regionfreegamer.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}