French RGB NES and European Version NES

I’m working on getting one of each toaster NES text variant. These two arrived recently.

The main difference between the variants is the subtext under “Nintendo Entertainment System” the French NES doesn’t look any different from the front though, it’s not really part of that set. What makes it special is the fact that France neither supported PAL nor NTSC video formats, and SECAM, the french equivalent was so bad that most consumer electronics skipped it completely and went for unencoded RGB via a connector known as SCART, or Peritel if you’re french.

So France got their very own consoles which usually only output RGB and nothing else.

RGB is unencoded so it’ll look amazing right?

Well…

For consoles which have RGB baked into the hardware yes, but the NES does not. So internally the French nes produces regular PAL composite video (the yellow AV plug on old TVs) then feeds it into a composite to RGB converter before chucking the results out the connector on the back, which is not a standard Nintendo port despite looking similar.

So the result looks just as bad or worse than the composite output on any PAL NES.

My set progress:

Got:

No subtext (NTSC/U)

Mattel Version

Hong Kong Version

Asian Version

Hyundai Comboy

Samurai Electronic TV Game

European Version

French scart

Need:

NES Version

Version Española Spanish Version (purchased; on its way)

Versione Italiana