SOURCE // RGB
DROP AN IMAGE HERE
or click to browse
OUTPUT // PAL CRT
▸ HOW PAL ARTIFACTING WORKS
Old CRT tellies decode colour from a 4.43 MHz subcarrier. When the Spectrum spits out a tight black/white dither, that pattern beats against the subcarrier and the decoder mistakes rapid brightness change for real colour — filling B/W areas with unintended hues (luma→chroma cross-talk).
On a 48K the pixel clock is slightly out of phase, so artifacts flicker as fringes. On a 128K the clocks lock, giving stable colours (as demos like Chromatrons Attack!!! exploit). The PAL 1-line delay line averages the chroma of each scanline with the one above, killing hue errors but softening artifacts into dithered vertical fringes.
Because the colour is born at the pixel level, it sneaks past the Spectrum's infamous 8×8 attribute clash — more than two colours per cell!