Posted By
TLC
on 2004-02-23
19:31:26
|  Re: Anyone seen one of these before?
I once talked with a guy from Argentina about these computers... Never seen one Drean C=s, though.
I guess I'm better quoting text from a site I've just found (http://www.lemon64.com/museum/view.php?id=282&genre=manualmisc )
"Drean was a very important Argentine company, which manufactured home electric equipment like for example, laundry machines. Drean is still operating but it does not have the importance that it once did.
By the middle of the eighties decade Argentina was recovering democracy after seven years of suffering a fascist military dictatorship. The social democrat government decided to promote the Argentine industry and behind the "Industrial Promotional System", corporations did not have to pay taxes while imports where under heavy taxes. The only way you could get a computer was through import paying a ridiculous price or by smuggling which was not an option for everyone.
Government decided to promote the production of computers and there is where Argentine electric and electronic corporations began to sell computers.
Drean produced the Commodore C=64C, Zserweny produced the ZX Spectrum and Nec produced the Talent MSX. Those were the local options in home personal computing.
I use the term "produced" because that what it says in the owner papers but actually computers were assembled with imported components. Maybe the plastic cases were injected here."
...
"One difference I can point out with the American model is that Argentine C64C used the PAL-N video norm, which is a PAL B local variation. In addition, another difference is that power supply was produced here according to the national standard, which are 220 Volts and 50 Hz."
The guy mentions one important point: Argentina uses PAL-N which is basically 625 lines @ 25Hz and PAL color encoding like regular PAL-B, but with NTSC color-subcarrier frequency (a very weird combination IMHO). I'm not going into speculations in the C64's case since the VIC-II allows pretty flexible combinations of crystal frequency (thus color subcarrier) and TV screen organization, but in the Plus/4's case, I can't think of any other possibility but either 1.) using a dedicated PAL-N TED version (if it ever existed), or 2.) equipping the computer with a PAL-B to PAL-N transcoder inside. Either should be interesting enough for a check  .
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