Master System Alf question

[tokumaru]

I'm not sure if they were using PAL-M though (Brazil is next to a PAL-N territory after all, many TVs were NTSC + PAL-N + PAL-M compatible, and they also sold consoles in Argentina which is a PAL-N territory).

All video game consoles officially released here output PAL-M (even if that means stuffing a transcoding board inside an otherwise NTSC console, as was the case of the Atari 2600 and the NES), that's for sure. PAL-N wasn't common around here at all... AFAIK, TVs only started supporting all 3 standards in the late 90's.

I must admit I don't know what the deal is with SEGA consoles exactly, since they don't have a transcoding board like some other consoles do, but since the VDP outputs signals that are converted into composite by another chip, there's probably something going on with that chip.

[Sik]

Alright, or maybe it was actually being converted by the RF unit (which is separate). Although that leaves composite - but then again, if the TVs supported NTSC it was probably easier to just output NTSC then. I know that in Argentina TVs became able to support both NTSC and PAL-N because VHS players were imported from the US and thereby NTSC, but the local TV signal was PAL-N, and having TVs support both was the easiest solution to that (eventually later that expanded to supporting PAL-M as well, since that allowed exporting the TVs to Brazil).

Pretty much every Mega Drive I've seen here was NTSC or PAL-N though (or toggled between those when they had a region switch), but if there was a RF unit it'd be always PAL-N (in practice everybody used composite instead). We also got the model 3 which is NTSC-only so it's safe to assume that by that point going NTSC-only was safe in Argentina.

[TmEE]

SMS2 VDP is not exclusively used in EU machines, whole variety is represented.

The whole PAL-M, N etc is irrelevant, the only difference is framerate and color subcarrier. Framerate is selectable between 50/60 on all VDP versions and color subcarrier is dependant on the crystal used with the RGB encoder circuit outside the VDP.