@@ryan89554 Honestly it's all about perspective and what you grew up with. If you were born in Europe you wouldn't have known any better since the internet wasn't what it is now. No TH-cam to make comparisons or anything back then. Obviously with this now they stand out as a result.
You are right. In 1990, Nintendo of Europe did re-release Super Mario Bros. with some bugfixes and PAL-specific optimizations, but it was still not perfect.
You forgot that PAL versions of games around the late 90s to mid 2000s often had extra, exclusive features. Take Luigi’s Mansion for example. When you beat the game it unlocks the Hidden Mansion. Everywhere else in the world it’s simply a repeat, however exclusive to the PAL version the Hidden Mansion is mirrored, significantly harder, enemy behaviours are altered even the boss behaviours are changed. There are a lot more ghosts, more treasure and you take more damage. It’s basically a super hard mode. Or Lylatwars (StarFox 64) has an unlockable Lylat language option so they talk the way they do in the SNES original. Or Mario 64 fixes the frame drop lag near the submarine. Converting to PAL often caused minor bugs that required more programming. As a result they often programmed in extra features like this if they had the time. PAL gaming is not always as inferior as you think.
@@checksum00 you didn’t even read my comment. It’s a common misconception that all PAL games run slower. It depends on how optimised they were. Some games were done perfectly, others only sped up the music, some did nothing at all and slapped borders around the screen (usually small third party games). PAL60 came around in the GCN era and are the best versions to play given the extra content and higher resolution. You forget NTSC was a garbage signal to begin with, PAL had RGB out of the box
i think it's generally fair to say that games from the 80s quite often were quite often porter poorly, and even a perfect port still squished the Image on a crt at least. Tho as u said the pal gcn is actually just the best version. tho even on the ps2 and gcn u still got quite a few games that only play in 50 fps, though speed adjustments were way more common and so was graphics adjustments thanks to 3d rendering. I would genuinely be interested in more info on the n64/ps1 as i don't have any experiences with those consoles and don't know that much about them in comparison (the fps thing certainly didn't matter anymore, as the 3ds barley got above 20fps anyways...)
The Mega Drive version of Shadow of the Beast was developed in the UK, and they never thought of the PAL/NTSC speed difference, so when the game was released in the US, it now plays too fast!
You should try the console ports of the old Amiga/ST game Gods. Game runs at a pitiful 12.5fps on Amiga...but at least it runs at a playable speed. For consoles they simply sped the game up until it ran at 60fps in NTSC territories.
@@thegreathadoken6808 Uhm, no sorry. Gods on the Amiga when using original hardware runs 50 fps on PAL and 60 fps on NTSC, just like it is supposed too. It is impossible to run any other fps as that is not how Denise works. Denise's frame rate is set to either PAL or NTSC depending on your region. Now why the fuck would that be you ask and the answer is very simply. The stock Amiga has no hardware clock, its clock is based on the Hz it gets from the net. If you insist that your Amiga runs Gods at 12.5 fps it should run every game on that particular Amiga at 12.5 fps, your original CRT Amiga monitor will show you a stroboscope effect way worse than interlacing (3 out of 4 frames will be black screens on PAL) and you should have a good look at your power supply as there is something terribly wrong with it.
It is worth noting that this problem is not caused by PAL itself being worse than NTSC. PAL was basically a modified and even improved version of the NTSC color television standard. Basically, the electric grid in Europe runs with 50 Hertz frequency instead of 60 Hertz in the US. The TV refresh rate in old non-digital TVs was provided by the frequency of the electric grid. Other methods would have been too complex or simply unfeasible back when those TVs were invented. So PAL lowered the frame rate to 50, and used the free bandwidth instead for higher resolution. This is why PAL TV shows were actually sharper than NTSC shows. I think higher sharpness for TV was actually preferable, since the frame rate of TV, even PAL, was quite high anyway. E.g. when you compare it to cinema: Cinema mostly used (and uses) just 24 frames per second and much higher sharpness than either PAL or NTSC. Moreover, NTSC TV had the problem that the colors of the TV program sometimes varied depending on how far the receiving sides were from the TV broadcaster, which is why NTSC was sometimes jokingly called "Never The Same Color". You can actually see this in some old VHS records of US TV shows which were uploaded to TH-cam: Some have a very yellowish tint. PAL, being essentially an improved copy of NTSC, avoided the color inaccuracy through clever technical tricks. So it is pretty safe to say that PAL was actually better than NTSC. But games themselves never used PAL/NTSC themselves, just TV sets which were optimized for those transmission standards. In this case NTSC TV sets were better for gaming. Not just because most games were developed with 60 Hz NTSC TVs in mind, but because most old consoles and console games had very low resolution anyway, much lower than even NTSC-only TVs allowed -- at least before the PS2 / GameCube / XBox generation. So the resolution advantage of PAL TVs was essentially useless for gaming. Moreover, for video games, frame rate is much more important than for video. While movies in their usual 24 FPS look pretty smooth most of the time, games at 24 FPS look much more choppy. The reason is that movies/TV have natural motion blur, determined by shutter speed. (This is similar to the human eye in respect to the physical world, which has actually even less temporal resolution, i.e. around 15 to 20 distinct "frames" per second.) But games don't have motion blur, each frame is perfectly sharp. This makes movements appear much less fluid to the brain. Some modern games try to artificially add pseudo motion blur, but the results are not as good as real motion blur.
And can blame all the NTSC problems on being adapted from B/W TV and needing backwards compatibility for it. Color was just kinda hacked into a well defined standard.
@@davidmcgill1000 Color was also "hacked into" the black-and-white 625-line standards as well (two times in fact, one with PAL and one with SECAM), but the designers of PAL and SECAM had the opportunity to watch NTSC working in the real world and learn from its flaws (PAL and SECAM each employ technical solutions so that they will not have the NTSC color shift issue). However, it's worth noting that the 625-line systems were defined with the knowledge that a color subcarrier would be hacked into them eventually, so the designers picked the bandwidth and line count carefully, so that anyone trying to hack color into it wouldn't have to slow down the refresh rate to accommodate the color subcarrier like the NTSC people had to (which had to slow down the frame rate from 60i to 59.94i). Don't ask for any more details, it's complicated. Nothing to do with not having the color shift issue though. That credit goes to the designers of PAL and SECAM.
Brazil used "PAL 60," which was 60hz 525 line, but with PAL color encoding, so was probably the best of both worlds for game consoles. There was also the Dendy, the Russian Famiclone, that managed to play NTSC games at near normal speed on PAL TVs due to some clever modifications, mainly adding more vertical blanking lines. An interesting thing about PAL encoding is that someone figured out how to reverse the encoding to remove most of the composite artifacts. Look up the BBC PAL Transform decoder.
That's debatable. I’m not sure that PAL is at all better. You'd have to have a relatively static screen and be sitting rather close to get any improvement from PAL over NTSC. What's worse though is that it made it extremely expensive to play videos from PAL regions in NTSC regions and vice versa as it's not simply a matter of converting the size of the image, but also deal with the timing issues as well.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade It is very unlikely you would have had to sit close to see the difference. The resolutions were generally very low compared to todays television, and the lower the resolution, the more visible is any upgrade in resolution. (This is also part of the reason why DVDs looked so much better than VHS tapes, while far more people would struggle to see a difference between FullHD and 4K.)
Amigas in the US had the same problem in reverse, for most of the games, since their primary target was the European market. To me, the issue isn't "avoid European consoles" as much as "try to play the games in their intended target systems"...
And yet they mostly didn’t use the extra lines of the PAL systems and left a thick black bar on the bottom for us (400 vs. 512, 200 vs. 256 without overscan)…
Strange thing about this... My Amiga played some music too fast, to the point where when i hear that particular game music after being played on a video or emulator, it sounds too slow
@@redstone0234 power strike 2 is the main example that comes to mind. Almost every longplay of it seems to be running at 60hz and the music is just comically fast
The problem is not the television standard ("PAL 50Hz") ... but rather the lack of optimisation by 80s/90s developers to handle multiple television standards (i.e. both NTSC 60Hz and PAL 50Hz) properly. If they had done it correctly, they would have coded their games such that the graphics fill the full 576 visible line space of PAL screens, and to adjust the scrolling algorithms to natively match an equivalent speed for 50Hz without feeling slower. In a fast scrolling game, this would mean moving the background more (on average) per frame on a PAL system, in order to keep the sense of speed high. As you said, RARE Inc. were one of the few mainstream developers to handle this properly.
Nah, as I said above, the problem entirely stemmed from what was coming out of the walls. NTSC regions use 110v - 130v @ 60hz, PAL regions use 220v - 240v @ 50hz. Back when consoles were new switching mode power supplies were insanely expensive (literally multiples of the console retail price) and gigantic (again literally multiple times the size of the consoles), for reference go take a look at the switching mode PSU in the original IBM PC AT, it was like 3x the size of an NES and cost close to 4 figures on its own. PAL consoles had to run at 50hz because PAL TVs ran at 50hz, NTSC consoles also had to match the frequency of NTSC TVs. Oh wait - I'm an idiot and totally misunderstood your point. I'll leave ^this here but yeah, I see what you meant now. Apologies 🤣
For most of these consoles like the NES and SNES, there's nothing those developers could do: The hardware is hardwired to output the same number of scanlines as on NTSC. Program code can't change that in any way. OTOH the extra scanlines did increase the vblank time, improving the system's video data transfer bandwidth in an important way. It's what makes Elite on the PAL NES possible. Unfortunately like the video says, games taking advantage of the PAL NES's longer vblank are few and far between, because the games were primarily made for the Japan/US market.
I don't think most of the older consoles even supported rendering the full 576 lines. I imagine that would have necessitated extra memory and it would have increased the price of the console. I also reckon it would have had the knock on effect of developers having to create a second set of larger sprites and other graphical assets for PAL versions of their games to match the extra resolution which could also have required larger cartridges and increased the price of games.
You cant fix missing frames you are literally losing 10 frames per second basically what you are talking about is no different than auto skipping in emulators which is horrible and you would have tons of information missing So in just 1 minute you lost 600 frames think about that
A bit of a nitpick, but the problem is not being NTSC or PAL/SECAM, but rather 50Hz vs 60Hz In the map in 10:22, for example, Brazil appear as a PAL country but in fact it uses 60Hz and 525 lines very similar to the US NTSC system. The difference is that it uses the PAL for color encoding And that's what NTSC, PAL and SECAM are really, methods to get color into a black and white signal. They don't define the frequency or resolution, that's why there's 60Hz PAL and technically a 50Hz NTSC signal is possible though I don't know if any country adopted something like that
I wanted to upvote this for speaking the gospel truth of Saints RD008 and RC011, Probotectors of us all, but then I saw your icon. I'm sorry for my non-meritocratic thinking but Mono-Bamse is too cursed for upvotes.
It is interesting … however if you have been used to only a PAL NES from when you were younger you would think the opposite Playing some of the MegaMan games on modern consoles made me wonder why these were so much faster and harder than I was used to when I played them on the original NES
This is down to sloppy developers and cost-cutting publishers not giving a shit about their customers. Same old story told a million times before and still the same today.
This was a big problem when speedrunning started becoming a thing. On N64 depending on the game Europe either had a massive advantage of having more time for reacting or performing frame-perfect tricks or a massive disadvantage of having an extra 17% added to their times. People serious about competing were shipping NTCS games and consoles to Europe, or in some rare cases PAL games and consoles to the US.
It seems like that ought to have been known about by then and a separate leaderboard should have been created with a reference adjusted time to help understand the difference. There used to be issues at times with arcade hardware not always running at the same speed as other copies of the same game, that could have higher requirements for hand eye coordination, but lower requirements for being able to man the machine for days on end.
Super Mario had both an unoptimised and optimised PAL release. The optimised release didn't quite land the music as you mentioned but it also messed up the physics and you can actually jump higher than in the NTSC releases and break blocks that you normally can't reach.
You say the problem went away in the "HD" era, but for a couple of games on the 360 that came out before the HDMI models, the situation was awful. They refused to run unless your console's system setting was 60Hz, but the 360 didn't even show that setting when plugged in over HDMI, because games can freely switch and the system setting is irrelevant... Meaning you had to fish out a composite or component connection to change a setting that had no real effect once you switched back just to make the game boot.
The hitman blood money on the 360 was like that, it would refuse to boot on a PAL50 configured console even if you where using the HDMI or component cables, the only way was to either dig out the composite cables or switch the component cable to composite and change the system settings to PAL60.
Just a little information I'd like to add: Brazil is a bit of an anomaly because although we adopted PAL, our electric grid operates at 60Hz and our monochrome system was System M (aka monochrome NTSC). This caused our contry to use a unique standard, PAL-M, which is basically NTSC but using PAL color encoding. A side effect of this is that a PAL-M equipment will output sound and image (without color) just fine on an NTSC TV set. So, if your TV set supports PAL-M and you don't mind bypassing any region locks to play NTSC games (or just play the PAL-M releases), brazilian consoles are just fine and run at full speed.
Watching this... wasn't what shocked me. It was LISTENING to it. Especially Sonic the Hedgehog, hearing slowed down PAL-version Green Hill Zone unlocked memories of old that had been overwritten by years of playing emulated games in their original speed. My God. This was it. This was how it REALLY was. Most of my games were ultra mainstream Nintendo fair like Mario and Donkey Kong Country (oh the days when we could have one game a year at best...), but now I wonder- games like Secret of Mana, Link to the Past, Mega Man X... I kinda want to hear PAL-sound tracks of those games now to compare and contrast. Though as I saw others say below- in some cases it's not so much nostalgia that leads to a preference for PAL but simply being part of those markets big enough to get their own translations, Germany, France, etc. So it's more a matter of playing in the language that you understand best. We in Sweden never had that, we got the English versions and had to be happy about that, but I imagine that's a substantive audience that aren't just blinded by nostalgia when they make their choice.
@@abrahamicreligionsbowbefor3585My collection of SNES games isn't very large, but the music speed doesn't seem to be affected in any of those. The same also goes for most of my Mega Drive games.
Back in the 90s, there were actually plenty of TVs sold in the UK that could handle both 50Hz and 60Hz signal, particularly those made by Japanese companies like Sony and Panasonic. The second games console I ever bought was a Japanese Mega Drive, which ran perfectly well at 60Hz (via RGB SCART) on my Sony Trinitron TV.
It might be because most retro gaming content (at lest as far as consoles go) is American, where only a handful of European games run too fast, so most people either don't know or simply don't need to care about it. On the microcomputer side a lot of the content is European and since most of those games were made in Europe (or Australia), it's not that big of a deal. It's also not always immediately apparent if the music plays at the right speed. I certainly had no idea about any of this when I first started collecting retro games. The first ones I bought were Mario games, which were all corrected to some degree. The unfortunate reality of PAL gaming smacked me in the face as soon as I first played Castlevania, which was completely unoptimised. That can at least be fixed by buying an NTSC console or modifying the PAL console (a good option for Mega Drives), but the real problem are the games where the music was sped up for the PAL release but the gameplay wasn't touched. This was done a lot for NES games and really sucks because then you have to choose between slower gameplay and normal music, or normal gameplay and sped up music. It seems like SNES and Mega Drive games don't really have that issue (the music isn't affected in any of the SNES games I own and the Mega Drive games either aren't affected or run too slowly on a PAL system).
That map only applies for TV broadcast, for example, in Americas the most common signal was NTSC specially in North America, but in South America only a few broadcast stations used the PAL format, but for videogame consoles, NTSC was the standard for all Americas with the exception of Brazil which was PAL-M, although its a 60hz type of PAL.
Great video. One thing I would say about 'nostalgia' is that if you played pal games back in the day, they're the version that will feel 'right' to you despite being objectively terrible in comparison to the correct NTSC originals; Like the NTSC versions would feel too fast compared to what you're expecting.
I've lived in Ireland all my life, so my experience with console gaming was always the PAL versions. About 15 years ago I decided to pick up my old NES library again in NTSC and took a gamble on a "broken, for parts" NTSC NES from an eBay seller in NY. Luckily, only the edge connector was dirty, so a disassemble and clean with IPA had it good as new again. After getting the games I realised one issue with the plan, my muscle memory was all wrong! I had to kind of relearn how to play Punch Out because the punches were arriving faster than I was used to responding to them. But I eventually got around it. A while later I tried to do the same with the SNES and even got the NTSC console but by then, the prices of the games had shot up so I never did. Still have the console but nothing to run on it.
Well PAL versions are still useful if you're not from the UK, can't read english and playing some text heavy game like Zelda or Secret of Mana. Back in the day, it was rare for us to have fully translated game to french, german, spanish, italian etc... And we didn't have access to rom hacked fan translation. So yes maybe it's nice for english speakers. But for non-english kids back then, the PAL was mandatory for some games.
Higher resolution too. For example PAL: GameCube: 720 × 480P/576i Dreamcast: 720 × 480P NTSC: GameCube: 640 × 480P Dreamcast: 640 × 480P But this gen changed it since we also had 60Hz with the extra resolution, so PAL was superior in the end.
If you live in Europe, the only counterpoint to this video is worth mentioning that depending on the retro console, ~5 through 20 percent of a library is PAL _only_. This is especially true of the PS2, which was a smash hit in Europe and had many many developers targeting 50Hz PAL players. Many of these won't play correctly on even an modded PS2 from NTSC regions nor display on anything but a European TV that is okay with the wonky 50Hz analog PAL standard. NTSC was better. Always. But not every game has an NTSC version. Most. But not all.
Most games of the 80's/90's relied on the screen refresh to drive the game, hence slower games in PAL. This was driven by the limits of the technology, so people should not really complain and the fact the NTSC TV's/CRT Monitors would not work in regions with 50Hz power as well. This is down to the CRTs guns tied to the power frequency to control the refresh of the screen. A faster system in PAL would IMHO be better than just switching to NTSC as the CPU would be able to get more done.
Ironically TV shows from the States, to this day are typically shown in PAL-land slightly too /fast/, as they reduce the 30fps to 24 then run the whole thing at 25. Same for films. Even this 4% increase in speed is very noticeable.
Depends on the show; for shows that were filmed on, well, film, the cameras almost always run at 24fps, so you have jerky 3:2 pulldown in the US and 4% fast in Europe. It's personal opinion which is "better". Shows that were "filmed" directly to tape were either scanned to film (at 24fps) and shown 4% fast in Europe, or used a machine that basically pointed a PAL camera at an NTSC display; preserving speed, but with a lower image quality (which most didn't notice due to the inherent softness of a 525-line "480i" image being converted to a 625-line "576i" standard).
@@nicholasfarley5967 Yes, they do a similar thing in the UK but achieve it by cutting bits out of the old shows - I'm not sure which approach is worse. TV shows in the UK used to only have about 6 minutes an hour of ads but it's now about 11 I think - closer to 20 in the States now isn't it?
I just noticed something: the timer speed in the PAL version of Super Mario wasn’t adjusted to accommodate the gameplay speed, meaning that it ticks down slower in the PAL version and therefore makes it easier to score higher.
PAL is not terrible at all. most consoles had better video output than their us version (rgb vs av and svideo) and the "slowness" is only slow if you are used to the games playing faster. for me a lot of ntsc games of old childhood games feel like I am pressing fast forward on them. sonic being the only good example of "slow is bad" because the game is all about speed. censorship in Germany (robots instead of humans) was not really bad, just ridiculous stupid XD
Yeah this video is a bit harsh. PAL arguably a better standard, and most the the problems here are because the devs rarely bothered to make it work properly. But mostly, at the time we just didn't care about this issue because we weren't aware of it. The fewest people got to compare PAL and NTSC. This is just how we played the games in PAL regions, so this is also authentic in a way. If you emulate then sure go with the version you prefer, but if you use original hardware and games it's still much easier to collect for the area you live in.
@@gaetan4164 Yes, exactly. Pal only got the short end regarding 480p support during the gc/Xbox/ps2 generation (but back then it was not widely used by Americans either. It's more important nowadays) and we missed out on some great games (well, at least we got Terranigma).
Frame rate is the least of your worries in some cases. The European market was the smallest and thanks to German laws many games were censored. Contra was made into Probotector (or however it is spelt), and we got Hero turtles. It's worth having a Japanese NES for Castlevania 3 as the US and European version lack the additional soundchip on the cartridge and were censored.
*Laughs in Eastern European bootleg cartridges* Eastern Europe fared the best, as most NES games were Japanese or US releases on pirated cartridges. And the Famiclones.
*Laughs in Eastern European bootleg cartridges* Eastern Europe fared the best, as most NES games were Japanese or US releases on pirated cartridges. And the Famiclones.
The 'hero' turtles was a result of UK law forbidding the use of the word 'ninja' in marketing toys for children. In Australia we got the Probotector version of Contra but still had TMNT.
So another video saying, that my NES, SNES and so on PAL collection is worthless "crippled" and "terrible". Yes many NES games suffer from slow music. But did I care as a child? No. Yes SNES might run slower, but I was SHOCKED when I played Castlevania IV the first time in NTSC. What a slowdown hell! Same for Super Ghost n Ghouls. It's unplayable for me. In case of SNES I really stick to my overpriced, crippled and worthless PAL games, because of the lesser slowdowns! Another thing not mentioned is the language of the games. I am German. I want to play my games in my native language. This is only possible on PAL. It bothers me when a game gets a rerelease (Kirby's Adventure) and I don't have the German text! So.. sorry.. overall it's your opinion and I have my opinions on it. I keep my systems vanilla. Overall thanks for this video. The later part is something I totally agree. GameCube, Xbox and Dreamcast systems did something awesome with PAL60. And I am more than glad it's the past now with the new consoles.
Well, 60 to 50Hz adjustments in speed are often not exactly optimizations so to speak. It works for games with variable speed, but most games were designed keeping pixel by frame movements in mind. So scrolling and enemy movements would stutter by trying. So, there are some rare examples which deal with that issue (iirc in Thunder Force 4 there are changes to the level design to get a similar pacing). In the mid-90s, it was more of a problem that the PAL devices had a higher resolution and various games were therefore displayed vertically compressed. I don't remember anyone complaining about the frame related to speed back then. It is now an issue because 60Hz gaming also found its way into the PAL region around 20 years ago and we got used to it since. At the end of the day it is more a matter of habit. Slower pacing might be easier in kind of objective point of view, but we are talking about memorizing gameplay here. If you train a game at 50fps without comparison, switching to 60fps will throw you out of the flow just as much as vice versa.
It's funny you mentioned Gradius and Contra specifically, which also suffered from not being able to use konami-developed mapper chips outside Japan. Contra lost intro and intermission screens and environment animation, Gradius got chopped down to 2 Options.
My most horrendous PAL experiences were from SNES times: Starwing (Starfox) ran on a postcard sized window, Street Fighter 2 on a extra narrow screen and FFVI glitched all the time and did not show the ending at all when played via adapter on PAL SNES. Sad times indeed!
I had and loved Starwing for the SNES, and I never actually noticed anything was amiss, but then I didn't have anything to compare to. My SNES was also modded and I did have FF VI (FF III we'd call it, which was the style at the time), but I guess I got around that issue by simply never managing to finish it.
@@23Scadu The FFVI ending glitch was such a big issue back then that UK SNES magazine Super Play had to print the whole ending as pictures for unlucky players such as me. But when thinking back and not being able to see the ending (only music was heard, otherwise the whole screen went black after Shadow fell down from a bridge) made the player imagine what happened and made the whole ending actually better than it really was!
Works both ways this, Shadow of the Beast and Prince of Persia 2 on the MD are unplayable almost at 60hz. Depends where the developer was based generally.
i always found the difference in resolution between pal and ntsc more noticeable than the speed. As children we didn't know that the games in other countries were faster, but we noticed that the aspect ratio was wrong, that the game characters looked squashed. those black bars at the edge of the screen were much more noticeable than the speed to someone who didn't know better. Only optimized games didn't have these problems, but in the end we Europeans for the most part were screwed twice, the aspect ratio and speed were wrong.
Now this video does have great info! And I'm going to share my curious story with tv standards differences. I live in a PAL country but my first console was not an original NES but one of those early superclones (a superclone is a clone made with chips which were a 100% copy of the original whose designs were leaked) But since it was a clone, it worked under the NTSC standard. My tv set as capable of displaying both PAL and NTSC systems so I had no problem with that. The other problem no one else seemed to be aware of around here was that 99% of cartridges sold here in Argentina, were bootlegs imported from Taiwan. So you didn't get a version of Mario with the music corrected to work at 50Hz, you got the NTSC versions of all games and had to play them on PAL systems. So I was one of just a few people in this PAL country playing NTSC games on an NTSC system running them all at the correct speed. The drawback with the games here is that all of those bootlegs were the NTSC japanese versions, so Mario 3 had all texts in japanese but at least I had the correct speeds. Now the curious part is that any friend of mine that came to play at my home, they were amazed by the image quality (no letterboxing and no vertical bars) and at the same time they were also disappointed to some extent because they felt like my system was running too fast, they felt like the NTSC games running on PAL systems were the real speed (Understand, that's all they saw everywhere except at my place, so of course, to them, it was my system running too fast). I as just a kid but I loved everything about electronics and the such and used to read whatever I could about it, so long before having a games console, I knew of the differences in color standards and regions although me having an NTSC system was just by chance, so I did understand that games were supposed to run as they did on my console. So when I upgraded to my Megadrive (Genesis in Argentina) I was decided to buy a clone with NTSC support if I didn't find an NTSC original. What a surprise, the original Sega Genesis Model 2 in Argentina, do have the switches to select region and tv system, they don't need modding. So I got one of those and never played a game using PAL system.
SMB that came with the original UK NES release (those units marked as MATTEL VERSION instead of NES VERSION) wasn't sped up like the version in your video. When my mates started getting NES consoles with the combo carts (I'm pretty sure Duck Hunt & SMB on the same cart) and we played the sped up version, it was freaky, especially the music sounding just plain wrong!
The PAL-M system used here in Brazil is... strange. It uses the same resolution and frame rate as NTSC but the color coding is different, so our consoles didn't have the problem european consoles had in regards to speed, but an unmoded north american or japanese console would appear in black and white through RF, S-Video or Composite. Since Nintendo took 3 years to release the Super NES here a lot of people relied on VHS that had built in NTSC-PAL-M converters, then later dedicated converters and modded consoles with built in converters became common over here. In the mid ot late 90s it wasn't uncommon for TVs, specially the higher end models, to be compatible with NTSC signal as well.
I can't argue with this anti-PAL treatise but I at least speak for myself when I say the real lure behind PAL gaming is the desire to play what was available in our own territory at the time - even if it resulted in an inferior experience. There is nostalgia at play here but there's a link with the past that is transportative in a way playing a US or Japanese game simply isn't.
PAL never really made much sense to me, as it had a lower frame rate and higher resolution at a time when TVs were relatively small and didn't get big fo many years later. So, you got a frame rate that was marginally worse for fast action like sports and video games and a resolution that was unhelpfully higher in regions where the houses were often times smaller than in NTSC America. It also ensured that any of the content being created in America would have to be converted to something that those devices could handle, which was a bit of a pain as the resolution was higher than the source material coming out of the US and the frame rate also needed to be dropped to accomodate it.
One advantage Pal Regions had over US was the Scart RGB Cable which We never got from 1987 until the Dreamcast the best We had was S Video even Japan had Scart RGB so if You lived in America from 1987 to 1998 You got Screwed when it came to Image Quality.
In NTSC land, Sonic runs really really fast, while in PAL he runs "politely" fast lol. I always wondered if someone who grew up with a PAL console would just absolutely suck at games like Punch Out an Ninja Gaiden if they tried to play the NTSC version. I would imagine if would throw your timing off if you played it one way all your life. Anyone know why EU tvs only went to 50 hz in the first place?
The TV frequencies were synced to the power grid frequency (probably saved them some hardware in the early days but I think TVs had grid independent clocks by the time consoles arrived). The European power grid runs at 50Hz while the US grids run at 60Hz. A side effect was the earlier introduction of 100Hz TVs (that still show only 50 pictures per second but refresh their phosphor twice as often) in Europe than America since 50Hz produces a more severe flicker than 60Hz which was tough on the eyes. PC users would just dial their monitors to like 75Hz to deal with the flicker but TVs had to do multiples of their base frequency so it had to be 50 or 100.
I think some games are better PAL. Jurassic Park (Mega Drive) has music that seems to fit the tone of the game better, the same with Dune: Battle for Arrakis (Mega Drive). I don’t recall Super Mario Bros having music that fast back in the day, but it explains why the music is also fast on the Wii Virtual Console version.
The PAL NES had a fixed bug with controller input not being properly detected during PCM playback. And NES games weren't that bad when slower, but when lower pitched! It's why I can handle Dendy region games.
Just so you guys know, Brasil uses PAL/M, which is more similar to NTSC than PAL. It is 60Hz not 50Hz, so games here runs in the "normal" intended 60Hz speed.
It's a bit of an overreaction, if coded proper they can run just as fast as they have more bandwidth usually just a lower clock-rate for the lower frame-rate of the signal they use. Since Pal has a higher resolution, they do have slightly more bandwidth (when measured per frame) (or in the Megadrive A LOT more bandwidth per frame in DMA for some reason :P ). But the problem of "how fast a game runs" is entirely up to the coding. Since the frame rate is slower and the resolution higher, you also have more time per frame to run code. This should more than make it possible to run the game at the "same speed" for the player. the Animations just need to be "sped up" AKA. If an running animation takes 6 frames? It now would need to run in 5 frames. That's it. if properly converted there is nor problem. But most were lazily converted. But lately you have been a person who has been doing a LOT of click bait, and .. it's not a good look for you my friend :) .As for instance: In the case of the Megadrive and Master system. Many of the games were made in European and South American Regions were PAL or SECAM was standard. And thus they ran fine. In fact due the the bandwidth (per frame) difference (for a Megadrive), such a game would sometimes be hard to port to the NTSC regions, especially in the case of the mega-drive, were BANDWIDTH and not CPU speed was the main factor of why the system could do so well. The higher bandwidth the system has, was one of the reasons it could keep up and often pass the SNES in some fields, heck the PAL/Secam console in some cases could have a stunning 50% per frame increase in bandwidth (per frame). Way more than what the extra few lines of resolution asked for. Now try adjusting for that, when you need to push for more frames per second, but per frame you have less bandwidth to deal with. Sure.. you have a lower resolution (and thus less to push through), but not 30% less :P.
At least there were no hiccups due to differences between the AC cycles in various regions (USA we are 60Hz, and UK and most of EUR is 50Hz). In fact, in the Famicom's home country of Japan (which uses 100V) the eastern half of the grid (incl. Tokyo) uses 50Hz whereas the Western half (incl. Kyoto and Osaka) uses 60Hz. As was correctly stated in the video, using RGB connections was really the way to go, so long as you had a monitor of the "Multisync" variety that allowed for various frame refresh rates (more specifically including 50 and 60 Hz). RGB also provided far superior color separation which further reduced color washing and provided cleaner, well delineated pixels. Also mentioned in the video was the "why" as to region ports suffering poorly - often, when a game was developed at that time, it was not known whether the game would be successful in its home region, so the question of porting was almost always "if" and not "when". For us yanks, a typical NES game went for $40-$50 (alot of money today, even more back in the late 80's) and a good chunk of that price went towards the cartridge manufacture, which is unlike today where you buy a digital copy or one on disc which costs about a dollar to produce. Also, Big N required a company to have Nintendo themselves do the manufacture and required a minimum quantity purchase. When you start to add up these costs to produce a game in that era, it becomes clear why the game speed and porting issues weren't always addressed during development (which is where the easiest place to solve this challenge is). Even in the modern era, our hi-def broadcast standards are not aligned (see ATSC vs. DVB), but at least the televisions and monitors all now use HDMI which allows for connected systems to negotiate resolution, frame rate, interlacing, audio and even color space (or "colour" space as the her majesty would have it) making those units damn near universal.
Have to laugh at the fact that I realised holding down the left mouse button fast-forwards TH-cam videos on the segment about PAL being slower, of all places!
I’m in the UK and this exactly why, for the PAL consoles which only output 50hz, I also own the equivalent NTSC system. So I have a Famicom, Super Famicom and Sega Genesis. Thankfully the PAL PS1 and N64 consoles and onwards could also output 60hz, so I don’t need to own extra consoles for those. By combining these with flash carts (or modded disc based consoles) I have easy access to Japanese and USA games so I can enjoy them all properly, full screen and 60hz.
Pal versions are still important if you want to play localized versions... And Pal versions are also often the last versions with bug fixes or extra content and less censorship than US versions. What's funny is that Pal 100% non-optimized games are the best today on emulators because we only have to force 60Hz One thing I really hate is that devs where lazy by not adjusting speed for 50hz and not using the extra screen space... But at least we had less slowdowns...
Great video. I discovered this when getting into retro in 2015. Was blissfully unaware as a UK gamer until I got a Cube in 2004 and suddenly got asked about 60hz on boot up. Dial forward and ps1 pal in 2015 was slow and bordered 😩. Every retro system after that I got NTSC Saturn, SNES, Genesis, NES, N64 etc. much better! To note though optimised pal games may well glitch if played on NTSC systems - see great randomised gaming article on the Saturn as an example
@Sharopolis: On Nintendo switch if you payed the expension pack for Nintendo switch only, if you used the NTSC app you have a choice to play the NTSC, or the Pal version of certain game in the N64 US version, not all the game have that, and the pal version of the app Europ and Australia, his just the NTSC version of the app with the same choices, since I grow-up with NTSC in Canada which is the same as US. it is kind of nice to experience what it would have been like to play Super mario 64 in Europe back then, and also Super mario 64 in Europe did have a feature that the US did not have language select, and also the Europeing French language is not censored, compare to the English version, the Expension pack including Sega genisis but no pal version choices in that one, and it also include what the base plan offers, and more currently. The Japanese side of the Expension pack is more of a rip off to me because Super mario 64 does have 2 diffrent version in Japan and they should at least match it with what happen with the US version, so they should have put both japanese version of Super mario 64 in the Japanese app. The Japanese side also have mega drive that is what the Sega genisis is called in Japan.
I agree PAL sucks for games developed abroad, but many European gamers also have nostalgia for the localised versions, i.e. games that show text in their own languages. US or Japanese releases won’t have those languages implemented, so there is no easy fix for this unfortunately.
Well i don't know about the language part almost all nes games only had English or Japanese versions even big languages like French or German where only supported by a small amount of games sold in the region sometimes even the manuals where not translated.
The Dreamcast has PAL 60Hz, unfortunately, most people were stuck with the jaggy DVD player and that's where the myth that consoles only do 30fps came from. And why most people think we only had 50Hz/25fps until the 7th gen despite all 3 non-Sony offerings giving us 60Hz like the rest of the world.
To add, the US China-made Dreamcasts fail more than the Indonesian-made PAL versions and Japanese Japan-made versions. Same with China-made US PS2s and Japan-made ROW PS2s, I have 3 dead US PS2s, and a Japanese launch White one.
A modded Mega Drive losing its composite and RF video output really does demonstrate how strictly manufacturers adhere to the display standards. NTSC uses a carrier signal of approximately 3.58MHz, where PAL uses 4.43MHz. Instead of using separate crystals, Sega used a single crystal at a much higher speed and then divided it to get the assorted clock rates. The NTSC video signal used a divider of 15, where PAL was a divider of 12. Of course if you multiply by those factors respectively then you'll find that you don't get exactly the same value for each - the NTSC master clock was approximately 1% faster at 53.693MHz instead of 53.203MHz (an up-tick supplied to all other hardware in the console). That variation is why a PAL console set to 60Hz mode won't work on many TVs, due entirely to the NTSC carrier signal being just under 1% slower than it should be. These days there exists Dual Frequency Oscillators (DFOs), though availability isn't great post-Covid. And not just for the Mega Drive/Genesis, but also an assortment of other consoles like the original Playstation, the Saturn, and even the NES and SNES. These, paired with mod chips where appropriate, can allow PAL and NTSC consoles to happily toggle back and forth between the appropriate frequencies. As an odd additional tid-bit, the four-lane setup of the Mega Drive region system means it's actually possible to configure a console in a PAL50 Japanese mode. It serves no purpose as no consoles were ever made in that config (it can even stop games from working), but it exists. You can also toggle the setting while the console is running to change language in some games - even part way through a scrolling message - but I don't recommend doing that.
When you're running contra side by side, at the moments the backgrounds sync up, they seem to be perfectly in time. Is this just my brain playing tricks?
on retro consols? no, pal runs slower because of the 50hz (instead of 60hz) electric network. so pal runs mostly at 25 instead of 30 fps. the devs of those games did some things to adjust the games for this, but mostly failed. pal consoles are (as far as I know) not designed to run on a 60hz grid(it might break), so 50hz it is. if you manage to make the console region free it would run to slow.
@@marioboi323 as far as I know (and i am not an expert) you should be able to get ntsc n64 running though a european power supply (if you life in europe) because all n64s use 12v DC. If you also have an european ntsc-compatible TV and an ntsc game, then you should be able to run an ntsc-n64 in europe. But if you really want to try this, do your own research because you might (but as far as I know shouldnt) fry you console
I remember some PAL game on the PSX gave you the option to switch to 60hz if your TV supported it. I thought it was Tekken 3 but apparently not, anyone remember which game did that?
back then, i remember almost every budget crt Television can run a sega dreamcast at 60 hz mode. but the expensive Loewe TV from my father can't handle this.
@@LovroPlaninšek The TV screen refresh rates of 50 or 60 Hz had been chosen to coincide with the power line frequency so as to avoid interference effects between the flicker of the screen and the flicker of the overhead lightbulbs or fluorescent lights. When US computers with 60Hz screens were introduced in 50Hz light Europe, the interference flicker gave office workers headaches, which led to "low flicker" standards for computing equipment such as "TCO Certified" This is no longer a problem, as old tech has been replaced with LED _backlights_ ,LED lightbulbs and electronic fluorescent ballasts which all typically operate at higher frequencies that don't cause interference that the eye can catch.
I'm the proud owner of a Famicom HVC-001, Famicom HVC-101, Super Famicom (with Super Game Boy 1 & 2), Japanese Nintendo 64, North American GameCube (with Game Boy Player), Color TV-Game 15V, consolised Game Gear, North American Master System, 60Hz-modded Mega Drive 1, 60Hz-modded Mega Drive 2 with Mega CD 2 (NTSC BIOSs used) and Genesis 32X, 60Hz-modded Saturn, North American Dreamcast, North American PlayStation, North American PlayStation 2 slimline and North American original Xbox in Wales, UK :) With UK power adapters / power supply mods and RGB and audio mods, Everdrives/multicarts and ODEs etc, played on an upscaled "PC-CRT" setup. The only system in the setup running at 50Hz is my Sega SC-3000 French RGB model 😄 15:31 😂😂😂
Personally I hated the letterboxing even more so than the slowness. But at the same time I had no idea about different TV standards and thought that it was just how home games were supposed to look like. The look and feel difference between home and arcade games was even more noticeable in Europe.
Consoles and computers by European companies were not so much affected by this because they and their games were designed to work with PAL from the ground up. NES SMB was sped up for the Wii VC PAL version - and the clock runs down much faster than the NTSC version! The AGA Amiga's can switch between 60 and 50hz at boot, many Amiga games had a 60hz option - especially the cracked pirate copies - likewise with the ST. @6:46 shouldn't happen if your TV is multi-system. I only experience the B&W picture with NTSC composite on a TV that's PAL only.
As an Australian, when i was a kid i obviously had no idea so it made zero difference to the enjoyment. Later down the track and after collecting till the PS2 i found out the difference. Thats when i started getting into emulation and was completely turned off from building my collection. These days im only interested in NTSC format for oldschool gaming. I find emulation suits my needs more anyway. Family man and havent the same amount of time anymore to be farting around with my old consoles
I would also say that I actually find the borders on old PAL games worse than the slower speed. I can get used to the slower speed (if I don’t compare it to the NTSC version!) but the huge borders are really off putting. They make the aspect ratio all wrong too. The SNES seems to be worse than the Mega Drive, I assume because of the different resolutions they run at? Equinox on the PAL SNES is the worst culprit for borders from what I’ve seen. They’re huge, bigger than other PAL games! The NTSC game is full screen so I don’t know why this game suffers more than others.
Most crts allow you to adjust the screen size through service menus or potmeters though. Kind of a bother to have to stretch the screen to the appropriate size every time you switch console(because all of em seem to warp/displace the image differently) but on most tvs its a fixable issue. The speed though you cant do anything about ever without modifying the console.
Well I still do have all my consoles staring from my Mattel Nes. But if I ever do get back into collecting games, I'd probably get a chiped Nes or Famicom.
it only happens with cheap conversions and relying on frame rates instead of doing it properly - if the tv and game supported it, you could play 60hz post 16bit era which was still the 90s and pre hdmi, they made tv's refresh that were independent of the electric system, 50/60/100hz in at least 94 if not before
The bootleg NES clones like Pegasus and Dendy solved this problem by simply running at the NTSC speed and passing the video output through a built-in converter to work on PAL displays, as they were aimed at the east-european market, which means that they can perfectly run imported Famicom cartridges.
It wasn't until years later that I realised how badly gypped we were in the UK. Not only did we get a slower, letter-boxed experience, we paid more for it than the US or Japan! But what you didn't know, you didn't know.
I'm pretty sure I played Contra (with the Rambo dudes) in PAL machines in the houses of a couple different friends, and I'm pretty sure they had original NES, not Famiclones (out of all of my acquaintances and before the launching of the N64, I only met one guy who had a Famiclone, but not a NES-on-a-chip version, although he still called it "Nintendo"; later my cousins got two different NES-on-a-chip Famiclones, but that was in the 2000s). I may have played Probotector in the house of another friend, but I'm not sure. I wonder how could that be possible.
I have used PAL consoles and found them OK. I did play NTSC games through adapters and not notice the speed difference. Probably due to being played on the PAL machines.
If there is a speed difference, there is an error in programming. Things are usually easy to fix with a couple of multipliers. Never programmed a game yourself? Sure, there will have been lazy conversions, but who decides what's the right speed? Would be very strange to hear pitch differences, the sound chip should run its own frequency as the output is analog and in no way related to screen refresh. I also miss the effect of other differences, like the resolution. PAL is 576 lines where NTSC is 480 lines. What did that do to the visuals? It is all about the Point Of View. No right or wrong here.
To be honest, this entire vid comes off as unnecessarily harsh - I don't argue that the percentage drop makes a massive difference, but the attitude of 'your PAL consoles and games are all trash' is a little too savage. Oh well, at least all of my old systems will happily run on my old CRT *and* look how they're supposed to - horses for courses, I suppose. 🤷♀
Could have been remedied alot earlier if every tv in Europe had external inputs rather than worrying about rf connection that all these consoles were equipped with in the box.
PAL did offer benefits over NTSC though, it has a slightly higher vertical resolution and handles colour better meaning less fringing and banding. Should mention the problem existed in the first place because of the different power outputs, PAL regions use 220v - 240v @ 50hz, NTSC regions use 110v - 130v @ 60hz, it was simply easier and cheaper to match the output frequency to the input frequency.
Very few games took advantage of the higher vertical resolution. A re-release revision of Super Mario World (PAL v1.1) was one of the few and it STILL had letterboxing with proper screen alignment. The better colour is only a real issue with tv broadcasts because of how broadcast signals were handled. There isn't that kind of difference between how a PAL or NTSC console outputs a video signal.
@@hankhill7827 That's simply not true. Forgive me, I'm no expert and I forget the exact reasons why but from memory, NTSC was used before colour TV was a thing at all and they kinda forced the colour signal in to the existing signal, PAL was created after colour TV was a standard and was designed with colour in mind from the outset. It is something to do with luma and chroma but as i say, the exact reason eludes me. I can say 100% that I've seen people who do know the reasons talk about it in the context of 8/16 bit machines and Adrian Black has demonstrated it a few times using NTSC & PAL C64s.
@@dungeonseeker3087 I know what you are talking about, colour subcarriers, and I agree that PAL is better at that because it has a wider frequency. But this doesn't factor into most consoles especially when they can output an RGB signal. RGB essentially bypasses the PAL/NTSC colour system and beams the raw data numbers into the electron guns in the TV. The situation with the Commodore is probably because it uses RF or composite cables.
@@hankhill7827 Yeah, this seems to be a case of yet another regional difference, Over here in PAL land RGB was not common at all until the early 00s (ish) outside of monitors, our TVs ran exclusively on RF right up until the mid 90s when we got component in the form of SCART. Essentially even going up to the 32 bit era everything we had ran on either RF or Component, I'm 99% sure the first consoles we got with RGB support baked in were the PS2 & OG Xbox. RGB was a thing for Amigas though, even going back to the A500 you either needed an RGB monitor or a huge module that hung off the back of the system and converted it to RF.
Japan is split on 50 and 60Hz power, but the TV refresh rate was the same. Few consoles and home computers offered higher resolution in PAL: they got more vertical border instead.
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It isn't the fault of the consoles, but rather the fault of game programmers not preparing a separate version for Europe adjusted for PAL timing.
This is the correct answer.
50 hz was a mistake, im glad i don't live in europe ha
@@ryan89554 Honestly it's all about perspective and what you grew up with. If you were born in Europe you wouldn't have known any better since the internet wasn't what it is now. No TH-cam to make comparisons or anything back then. Obviously with this now they stand out as a result.
Yep
You are right. In 1990, Nintendo of Europe did re-release Super Mario Bros. with some bugfixes and PAL-specific optimizations, but it was still not perfect.
You forgot that PAL versions of games around the late 90s to mid 2000s often had extra, exclusive features. Take Luigi’s Mansion for example. When you beat the game it unlocks the Hidden Mansion. Everywhere else in the world it’s simply a repeat, however exclusive to the PAL version the Hidden Mansion is mirrored, significantly harder, enemy behaviours are altered even the boss behaviours are changed. There are a lot more ghosts, more treasure and you take more damage. It’s basically a super hard mode.
Or Lylatwars (StarFox 64) has an unlockable Lylat language option so they talk the way they do in the SNES original.
Or Mario 64 fixes the frame drop lag near the submarine.
Converting to PAL often caused minor bugs that required more programming. As a result they often programmed in extra features like this if they had the time. PAL gaming is not always as inferior as you think.
So, play a garbage game just cause of the DVD extras, pretty much. Good logic.
@@checksum00 you didn’t even read my comment. It’s a common misconception that all PAL games run slower. It depends on how optimised they were. Some games were done perfectly, others only sped up the music, some did nothing at all and slapped borders around the screen (usually small third party games). PAL60 came around in the GCN era and are the best versions to play given the extra content and higher resolution.
You forget NTSC was a garbage signal to begin with, PAL had RGB out of the box
@@checksum00 Pal Gamecube is better than ntsc as the games run correctly and the cases look better
i think it's generally fair to say that games from the 80s quite often were quite often porter poorly, and even a perfect port still squished the Image on a crt at least.
Tho as u said the pal gcn is actually just the best version.
tho even on the ps2 and gcn u still got quite a few games that only play in 50 fps, though speed adjustments were way more common and so was graphics adjustments thanks to 3d rendering.
I would genuinely be interested in more info on the n64/ps1 as i don't have any experiences with those consoles and don't know that much about them in comparison (the fps thing certainly didn't matter anymore, as the 3ds barley got above 20fps anyways...)
The Mega Drive version of Shadow of the Beast was developed in the UK, and they never thought of the PAL/NTSC speed difference, so when the game was released in the US, it now plays too fast!
That would explain the insanely fast parallax scrolling in the background.
As Kim justice so rightly said,the u.s version comes across as 'shadow of the beast yo gabga gabba! Edition.'
You should try the console ports of the old Amiga/ST game Gods.
Game runs at a pitiful 12.5fps on Amiga...but at least it runs at a playable speed. For consoles they simply sped the game up until it ran at 60fps in NTSC territories.
Hello, you….!!!
@@thegreathadoken6808 Uhm, no sorry. Gods on the Amiga when using original hardware runs 50 fps on PAL and 60 fps on NTSC, just like it is supposed too. It is impossible to run any other fps as that is not how Denise works. Denise's frame rate is set to either PAL or NTSC depending on your region.
Now why the fuck would that be you ask and the answer is very simply. The stock Amiga has no hardware clock, its clock is based on the Hz it gets from the net.
If you insist that your Amiga runs Gods at 12.5 fps it should run every game on that particular Amiga at 12.5 fps, your original CRT Amiga monitor will show you a stroboscope effect way worse than interlacing (3 out of 4 frames will be black screens on PAL) and you should have a good look at your power supply as there is something terribly wrong with it.
Dude.. We played what worked on our TV and nobody was any the wiser. Literally no-one cared.
It is worth noting that this problem is not caused by PAL itself being worse than NTSC. PAL was basically a modified and even improved version of the NTSC color television standard.
Basically, the electric grid in Europe runs with 50 Hertz frequency instead of 60 Hertz in the US. The TV refresh rate in old non-digital TVs was provided by the frequency of the electric grid. Other methods would have been too complex or simply unfeasible back when those TVs were invented. So PAL lowered the frame rate to 50, and used the free bandwidth instead for higher resolution.
This is why PAL TV shows were actually sharper than NTSC shows. I think higher sharpness for TV was actually preferable, since the frame rate of TV, even PAL, was quite high anyway. E.g. when you compare it to cinema: Cinema mostly used (and uses) just 24 frames per second and much higher sharpness than either PAL or NTSC.
Moreover, NTSC TV had the problem that the colors of the TV program sometimes varied depending on how far the receiving sides were from the TV broadcaster, which is why NTSC was sometimes jokingly called "Never The Same Color". You can actually see this in some old VHS records of US TV shows which were uploaded to TH-cam: Some have a very yellowish tint. PAL, being essentially an improved copy of NTSC, avoided the color inaccuracy through clever technical tricks.
So it is pretty safe to say that PAL was actually better than NTSC. But games themselves never used PAL/NTSC themselves, just TV sets which were optimized for those transmission standards. In this case NTSC TV sets were better for gaming. Not just because most games were developed with 60 Hz NTSC TVs in mind, but because most old consoles and console games had very low resolution anyway, much lower than even NTSC-only TVs allowed -- at least before the PS2 / GameCube / XBox generation. So the resolution advantage of PAL TVs was essentially useless for gaming.
Moreover, for video games, frame rate is much more important than for video. While movies in their usual 24 FPS look pretty smooth most of the time, games at 24 FPS look much more choppy. The reason is that movies/TV have natural motion blur, determined by shutter speed. (This is similar to the human eye in respect to the physical world, which has actually even less temporal resolution, i.e. around 15 to 20 distinct "frames" per second.) But games don't have motion blur, each frame is perfectly sharp. This makes movements appear much less fluid to the brain. Some modern games try to artificially add pseudo motion blur, but the results are not as good as real motion blur.
And can blame all the NTSC problems on being adapted from B/W TV and needing backwards compatibility for it. Color was just kinda hacked into a well defined standard.
@@davidmcgill1000 Color was also "hacked into" the black-and-white 625-line standards as well (two times in fact, one with PAL and one with SECAM), but the designers of PAL and SECAM had the opportunity to watch NTSC working in the real world and learn from its flaws (PAL and SECAM each employ technical solutions so that they will not have the NTSC color shift issue).
However, it's worth noting that the 625-line systems were defined with the knowledge that a color subcarrier would be hacked into them eventually, so the designers picked the bandwidth and line count carefully, so that anyone trying to hack color into it wouldn't have to slow down the refresh rate to accommodate the color subcarrier like the NTSC people had to (which had to slow down the frame rate from 60i to 59.94i). Don't ask for any more details, it's complicated. Nothing to do with not having the color shift issue though. That credit goes to the designers of PAL and SECAM.
Brazil used "PAL 60," which was 60hz 525 line, but with PAL color encoding, so was probably the best of both worlds for game consoles.
There was also the Dendy, the Russian Famiclone, that managed to play NTSC games at near normal speed on PAL TVs due to some clever modifications, mainly adding more vertical blanking lines.
An interesting thing about PAL encoding is that someone figured out how to reverse the encoding to remove most of the composite artifacts. Look up the BBC PAL Transform decoder.
That's debatable. I’m not sure that PAL is at all better. You'd have to have a relatively static screen and be sitting rather close to get any improvement from PAL over NTSC. What's worse though is that it made it extremely expensive to play videos from PAL regions in NTSC regions and vice versa as it's not simply a matter of converting the size of the image, but also deal with the timing issues as well.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade It is very unlikely you would have had to sit close to see the difference. The resolutions were generally very low compared to todays television, and the lower the resolution, the more visible is any upgrade in resolution. (This is also part of the reason why DVDs looked so much better than VHS tapes, while far more people would struggle to see a difference between FullHD and 4K.)
Amigas in the US had the same problem in reverse, for most of the games, since their primary target was the European market. To me, the issue isn't "avoid European consoles" as much as "try to play the games in their intended target systems"...
Same for the sega master system
Because they where mainly sold in europe
In the US and japan games are just faster than intended
And yet they mostly didn’t use the extra lines of the PAL systems and left a thick black bar on the bottom for us (400 vs. 512, 200 vs. 256 without overscan)…
Amigas are a very real contender for best machine in all of this too, depending on your age perhaps.
Strange thing about this... My Amiga played some music too fast, to the point where when i hear that particular game music after being played on a video or emulator, it sounds too slow
@@redstone0234 power strike 2 is the main example that comes to mind. Almost every longplay of it seems to be running at 60hz and the music is just comically fast
Sonic's Starlight Zone soundtrack in PAL region speed was far better than original NTSC speed.
The problem is not the television standard ("PAL 50Hz") ... but rather the lack of optimisation by 80s/90s developers to handle multiple television standards (i.e. both NTSC 60Hz and PAL 50Hz) properly.
If they had done it correctly, they would have coded their games such that the graphics fill the full 576 visible line space of PAL screens, and to adjust the scrolling algorithms to natively match an equivalent speed for 50Hz without feeling slower. In a fast scrolling game, this would mean moving the background more (on average) per frame on a PAL system, in order to keep the sense of speed high.
As you said, RARE Inc. were one of the few mainstream developers to handle this properly.
Nah, as I said above, the problem entirely stemmed from what was coming out of the walls. NTSC regions use 110v - 130v @ 60hz, PAL regions use 220v - 240v @ 50hz. Back when consoles were new switching mode power supplies were insanely expensive (literally multiples of the console retail price) and gigantic (again literally multiple times the size of the consoles), for reference go take a look at the switching mode PSU in the original IBM PC AT, it was like 3x the size of an NES and cost close to 4 figures on its own. PAL consoles had to run at 50hz because PAL TVs ran at 50hz, NTSC consoles also had to match the frequency of NTSC TVs.
Oh wait - I'm an idiot and totally misunderstood your point. I'll leave ^this here but yeah, I see what you meant now. Apologies 🤣
For most of these consoles like the NES and SNES, there's nothing those developers could do: The hardware is hardwired to output the same number of scanlines as on NTSC. Program code can't change that in any way.
OTOH the extra scanlines did increase the vblank time, improving the system's video data transfer bandwidth in an important way. It's what makes Elite on the PAL NES possible. Unfortunately like the video says, games taking advantage of the PAL NES's longer vblank are few and far between, because the games were primarily made for the Japan/US market.
I don't think most of the older consoles even supported rendering the full 576 lines. I imagine that would have necessitated extra memory and it would have increased the price of the console. I also reckon it would have had the knock on effect of developers having to create a second set of larger sprites and other graphical assets for PAL versions of their games to match the extra resolution which could also have required larger cartridges and increased the price of games.
@@dungeonseeker3087 TV sets do not (nor ever did) sync from the mains. They sync to the incoming signal.
You cant fix missing frames you are literally losing 10 frames per second basically what you are talking about is no different than auto skipping in emulators which is horrible and you would have tons of information missing
So in just 1 minute you lost 600 frames think about that
A bit of a nitpick, but the problem is not being NTSC or PAL/SECAM, but rather 50Hz vs 60Hz
In the map in 10:22, for example, Brazil appear as a PAL country but in fact it uses 60Hz and 525 lines very similar to the US NTSC system. The difference is that it uses the PAL for color encoding
And that's what NTSC, PAL and SECAM are really, methods to get color into a black and white signal. They don't define the frequency or resolution, that's why there's 60Hz PAL and technically a 50Hz NTSC signal is possible though I don't know if any country adopted something like that
3:02 Technically the European version was 66.416% _more_ awesome, because the robot main characters increase the awesomeness by 100%.
I wanted to upvote this for speaking the gospel truth of Saints RD008 and RC011, Probotectors of us all, but then I saw your icon. I'm sorry for my non-meritocratic thinking but Mono-Bamse is too cursed for upvotes.
@@goranisacson2502 That's fair, honestly I deserve worse for summoning him into this reality.
It is interesting … however if you have been used to only a PAL NES from when you were younger you would think the opposite
Playing some of the MegaMan games on modern consoles made me wonder why these were so much faster and harder than I was used to when I played them on the original NES
This is down to sloppy developers and cost-cutting publishers not giving a shit about their customers. Same old story told a million times before and still the same today.
This was a big problem when speedrunning started becoming a thing. On N64 depending on the game Europe either had a massive advantage of having more time for reacting or performing frame-perfect tricks or a massive disadvantage of having an extra 17% added to their times. People serious about competing were shipping NTCS games and consoles to Europe, or in some rare cases PAL games and consoles to the US.
It seems like that ought to have been known about by then and a separate leaderboard should have been created with a reference adjusted time to help understand the difference. There used to be issues at times with arcade hardware not always running at the same speed as other copies of the same game, that could have higher requirements for hand eye coordination, but lower requirements for being able to man the machine for days on end.
Super Mario had both an unoptimised and optimised PAL release. The optimised release didn't quite land the music as you mentioned but it also messed up the physics and you can actually jump higher than in the NTSC releases and break blocks that you normally can't reach.
You say the problem went away in the "HD" era, but for a couple of games on the 360 that came out before the HDMI models, the situation was awful. They refused to run unless your console's system setting was 60Hz, but the 360 didn't even show that setting when plugged in over HDMI, because games can freely switch and the system setting is irrelevant... Meaning you had to fish out a composite or component connection to change a setting that had no real effect once you switched back just to make the game boot.
Raving Rabbits on the Wii had an impossible level that could only be finished in 60hz mode, it was impossible in 50hz!
The hitman blood money on the 360 was like that, it would refuse to boot on a PAL50 configured console even if you where using the HDMI or component cables, the only way was to either dig out the composite cables or switch the component cable to composite and change the system settings to PAL60.
@@nicholasfarley5967 What the fuck, really?!
Just a little information I'd like to add: Brazil is a bit of an anomaly because although we adopted PAL, our electric grid operates at 60Hz and our monochrome system was System M (aka monochrome NTSC). This caused our contry to use a unique standard, PAL-M, which is basically NTSC but using PAL color encoding. A side effect of this is that a PAL-M equipment will output sound and image (without color) just fine on an NTSC TV set.
So, if your TV set supports PAL-M and you don't mind bypassing any region locks to play NTSC games (or just play the PAL-M releases), brazilian consoles are just fine and run at full speed.
Watching this... wasn't what shocked me. It was LISTENING to it. Especially Sonic the Hedgehog, hearing slowed down PAL-version Green Hill Zone unlocked memories of old that had been overwritten by years of playing emulated games in their original speed. My God. This was it. This was how it REALLY was. Most of my games were ultra mainstream Nintendo fair like Mario and Donkey Kong Country (oh the days when we could have one game a year at best...), but now I wonder- games like Secret of Mana, Link to the Past, Mega Man X... I kinda want to hear PAL-sound tracks of those games now to compare and contrast.
Though as I saw others say below- in some cases it's not so much nostalgia that leads to a preference for PAL but simply being part of those markets big enough to get their own translations, Germany, France, etc. So it's more a matter of playing in the language that you understand best. We in Sweden never had that, we got the English versions and had to be happy about that, but I imagine that's a substantive audience that aren't just blinded by nostalgia when they make their choice.
Secret of Mana songs seem the same in PAL and NTSC, played PAL as a kid
@@abrahamicreligionsbowbefor3585My collection of SNES games isn't very large, but the music speed doesn't seem to be affected in any of those. The same also goes for most of my Mega Drive games.
Back in the 90s, there were actually plenty of TVs sold in the UK that could handle both 50Hz and 60Hz signal, particularly those made by Japanese companies like Sony and Panasonic. The second games console I ever bought was a Japanese Mega Drive, which ran perfectly well at 60Hz (via RGB SCART) on my Sony Trinitron TV.
Me too on Metz Scart RGB. SNES I had the US version.
I still have a early 90s Phillips crt that will do both 50/60hz
I am still surprised how many here in europe are still completely unaware of this. Even people who are into retro gaming.
It might be because most retro gaming content (at lest as far as consoles go) is American, where only a handful of European games run too fast, so most people either don't know or simply don't need to care about it. On the microcomputer side a lot of the content is European and since most of those games were made in Europe (or Australia), it's not that big of a deal. It's also not always immediately apparent if the music plays at the right speed.
I certainly had no idea about any of this when I first started collecting retro games. The first ones I bought were Mario games, which were all corrected to some degree. The unfortunate reality of PAL gaming smacked me in the face as soon as I first played Castlevania, which was completely unoptimised. That can at least be fixed by buying an NTSC console or modifying the PAL console (a good option for Mega Drives), but the real problem are the games where the music was sped up for the PAL release but the gameplay wasn't touched. This was done a lot for NES games and really sucks because then you have to choose between slower gameplay and normal music, or normal gameplay and sped up music. It seems like SNES and Mega Drive games don't really have that issue (the music isn't affected in any of the SNES games I own and the Mega Drive games either aren't affected or run too slowly on a PAL system).
That map only applies for TV broadcast, for example, in Americas the most common signal was NTSC specially in North America, but in South America only a few broadcast stations used the PAL format, but for videogame consoles, NTSC was the standard for all Americas with the exception of Brazil which was PAL-M, although its a 60hz type of PAL.
Great video. One thing I would say about 'nostalgia' is that if you played pal games back in the day, they're the version that will feel 'right' to you despite being objectively terrible in comparison to the correct NTSC originals; Like the NTSC versions would feel too fast compared to what you're expecting.
I've lived in Ireland all my life, so my experience with console gaming was always the PAL versions. About 15 years ago I decided to pick up my old NES library again in NTSC and took a gamble on a "broken, for parts" NTSC NES from an eBay seller in NY. Luckily, only the edge connector was dirty, so a disassemble and clean with IPA had it good as new again. After getting the games I realised one issue with the plan, my muscle memory was all wrong! I had to kind of relearn how to play Punch Out because the punches were arriving faster than I was used to responding to them. But I eventually got around it. A while later I tried to do the same with the SNES and even got the NTSC console but by then, the prices of the games had shot up so I never did. Still have the console but nothing to run on it.
Colin McRae Rally 2.0 had the inverse problem where the NTSC version ran a touch slower than the original PAL release.
Well PAL versions are still useful if you're not from the UK, can't read english and playing some text heavy game like Zelda or Secret of Mana. Back in the day, it was rare for us to have fully translated game to french, german, spanish, italian etc... And we didn't have access to rom hacked fan translation. So yes maybe it's nice for english speakers. But for non-english kids back then, the PAL was mandatory for some games.
IRC the pal signal had better colour accuracy at the sacrifice of 10hz
Higher resolution too.
For example
PAL:
GameCube: 720 × 480P/576i
Dreamcast: 720 × 480P
NTSC:
GameCube: 640 × 480P
Dreamcast: 640 × 480P
But this gen changed it since we also had 60Hz with the extra resolution, so PAL was superior in the end.
If you live in Europe, the only counterpoint to this video is worth mentioning that depending on the retro console, ~5 through 20 percent of a library is PAL _only_. This is especially true of the PS2, which was a smash hit in Europe and had many many developers targeting 50Hz PAL players. Many of these won't play correctly on even an modded PS2 from NTSC regions nor display on anything but a European TV that is okay with the wonky 50Hz analog PAL standard.
NTSC was better. Always. But not every game has an NTSC version. Most. But not all.
Meh, it's all relative, I never understood the need to import consoles etc, so enjoyed these games at the speed provided. I just don't care :D
Most games of the 80's/90's relied on the screen refresh to drive the game, hence slower games in PAL. This was driven by the limits of the technology, so people should not really complain and the fact the NTSC TV's/CRT Monitors would not work in regions with 50Hz power as well. This is down to the CRTs guns tied to the power frequency to control the refresh of the screen.
A faster system in PAL would IMHO be better than just switching to NTSC as the CPU would be able to get more done.
Ironically TV shows from the States, to this day are typically shown in PAL-land slightly too /fast/, as they reduce the 30fps to 24 then run the whole thing at 25. Same for films. Even this 4% increase in speed is very noticeable.
Depends on the show; for shows that were filmed on, well, film, the cameras almost always run at 24fps, so you have jerky 3:2 pulldown in the US and 4% fast in Europe. It's personal opinion which is "better". Shows that were "filmed" directly to tape were either scanned to film (at 24fps) and shown 4% fast in Europe, or used a machine that basically pointed a PAL camera at an NTSC display; preserving speed, but with a lower image quality (which most didn't notice due to the inherent softness of a 525-line "480i" image being converted to a 625-line "576i" standard).
They now speed up syndicated old shows in the US so they can fit more adverts in!
@@mallardtheduck1 Indeed, I was trying to dumb it down a bit for the purposes of a short comment 😀 but you're quite right.
@@nicholasfarley5967 Yes, they do a similar thing in the UK but achieve it by cutting bits out of the old shows - I'm not sure which approach is worse. TV shows in the UK used to only have about 6 minutes an hour of ads but it's now about 11 I think - closer to 20 in the States now isn't it?
I just noticed something: the timer speed in the PAL version of Super Mario wasn’t adjusted to accommodate the gameplay speed, meaning that it ticks down slower in the PAL version and therefore makes it easier to score higher.
PAL is not terrible at all. most consoles had better video output than their us version (rgb vs av and svideo) and the "slowness" is only slow if you are used to the games playing faster. for me a lot of ntsc games of old childhood games feel like I am pressing fast forward on them. sonic being the only good example of "slow is bad" because the game is all about speed.
censorship in Germany (robots instead of humans) was not really bad, just ridiculous stupid XD
Yeah this video is a bit harsh. PAL arguably a better standard, and most the the problems here are because the devs rarely bothered to make it work properly. But mostly, at the time we just didn't care about this issue because we weren't aware of it. The fewest people got to compare PAL and NTSC. This is just how we played the games in PAL regions, so this is also authentic in a way. If you emulate then sure go with the version you prefer, but if you use original hardware and games it's still much easier to collect for the area you live in.
@@gaetan4164 Yes, exactly. Pal only got the short end regarding 480p support during the gc/Xbox/ps2 generation (but back then it was not widely used by Americans either. It's more important nowadays) and we missed out on some great games (well, at least we got Terranigma).
Frame rate is the least of your worries in some cases. The European market was the smallest and thanks to German laws many games were censored. Contra was made into Probotector (or however it is spelt), and we got Hero turtles. It's worth having a Japanese NES for Castlevania 3 as the US and European version lack the additional soundchip on the cartridge and were censored.
*Laughs in Eastern European bootleg cartridges*
Eastern Europe fared the best, as most NES games were Japanese or US releases on pirated cartridges. And the Famiclones.
*Laughs in Eastern European bootleg cartridges*
Eastern Europe fared the best, as most NES games were Japanese or US releases on pirated cartridges. And the Famiclones.
The 'hero' turtles was a result of UK law forbidding the use of the word 'ninja' in marketing toys for children. In Australia we got the Probotector version of Contra but still had TMNT.
@@fungo6631 Yea but you forget the part where you where first playing the nes games when the n64 or even the game cube was already out.
Germany really likes to mess up the rest of europe.
So another video saying, that my NES, SNES and so on PAL collection is worthless "crippled" and "terrible".
Yes many NES games suffer from slow music. But did I care as a child? No.
Yes SNES might run slower, but I was SHOCKED when I played Castlevania IV the first time in NTSC. What a slowdown hell! Same for Super Ghost n Ghouls. It's unplayable for me. In case of SNES I really stick to my overpriced, crippled and worthless PAL games, because of the lesser slowdowns! Another thing not mentioned is the language of the games. I am German. I want to play my games in my native language. This is only possible on PAL. It bothers me when a game gets a rerelease (Kirby's Adventure) and I don't have the German text!
So.. sorry.. overall it's your opinion and I have my opinions on it. I keep my systems vanilla.
Overall thanks for this video. The later part is something I totally agree. GameCube, Xbox and Dreamcast systems did something awesome with PAL60. And I am more than glad it's the past now with the new consoles.
Well, 60 to 50Hz adjustments in speed are often not exactly optimizations so to speak. It works for games with variable speed, but most games were designed keeping pixel by frame movements in mind. So scrolling and enemy movements would stutter by trying. So, there are some rare examples which deal with that issue (iirc in Thunder Force 4 there are changes to the level design to get a similar pacing).
In the mid-90s, it was more of a problem that the PAL devices had a higher resolution and various games were therefore displayed vertically compressed. I don't remember anyone complaining about the frame related to speed back then. It is now an issue because 60Hz gaming also found its way into the PAL region around 20 years ago and we got used to it since.
At the end of the day it is more a matter of habit. Slower pacing might be easier in kind of objective point of view, but we are talking about memorizing gameplay here. If you train a game at 50fps without comparison, switching to 60fps will throw you out of the flow just as much as vice versa.
It's funny you mentioned Gradius and Contra specifically, which also suffered from not being able to use konami-developed mapper chips outside Japan. Contra lost intro and intermission screens and environment animation, Gradius got chopped down to 2 Options.
My most horrendous PAL experiences were from SNES times: Starwing (Starfox) ran on a postcard sized window, Street Fighter 2 on a extra narrow screen and FFVI glitched all the time and did not show the ending at all when played via adapter on PAL SNES. Sad times indeed!
I had and loved Starwing for the SNES, and I never actually noticed anything was amiss, but then I didn't have anything to compare to. My SNES was also modded and I did have FF VI (FF III we'd call it, which was the style at the time), but I guess I got around that issue by simply never managing to finish it.
There's a patch for FF6 and PAL. FF4 works just fine tho.
@@23Scadu The FFVI ending glitch was such a big issue back then that UK SNES magazine Super Play had to print the whole ending as pictures for unlucky players such as me. But when thinking back and not being able to see the ending (only music was heard, otherwise the whole screen went black after Shadow fell down from a bridge) made the player imagine what happened and made the whole ending actually better than it really was!
Works both ways this, Shadow of the Beast and Prince of Persia 2 on the MD are unplayable almost at 60hz. Depends where the developer was based generally.
i always found the difference in resolution between pal and ntsc more noticeable than the speed. As children we didn't know that the games in other countries were faster, but we noticed that the aspect ratio was wrong, that the game characters looked squashed. those black bars at the edge of the screen were much more noticeable than the speed to someone who didn't know better. Only optimized games didn't have these problems, but in the end we Europeans for the most part were screwed twice, the aspect ratio and speed were wrong.
Had my snes converted to 60hz. Also made sure subsequent consoles were imports up until the hd era when the problem ceased
Now this video does have great info! And I'm going to share my curious story with tv standards differences. I live in a PAL country but my first console was not an original NES but one of those early superclones (a superclone is a clone made with chips which were a 100% copy of the original whose designs were leaked) But since it was a clone, it worked under the NTSC standard. My tv set as capable of displaying both PAL and NTSC systems so I had no problem with that. The other problem no one else seemed to be aware of around here was that 99% of cartridges sold here in Argentina, were bootlegs imported from Taiwan. So you didn't get a version of Mario with the music corrected to work at 50Hz, you got the NTSC versions of all games and had to play them on PAL systems. So I was one of just a few people in this PAL country playing NTSC games on an NTSC system running them all at the correct speed. The drawback with the games here is that all of those bootlegs were the NTSC japanese versions, so Mario 3 had all texts in japanese but at least I had the correct speeds.
Now the curious part is that any friend of mine that came to play at my home, they were amazed by the image quality (no letterboxing and no vertical bars) and at the same time they were also disappointed to some extent because they felt like my system was running too fast, they felt like the NTSC games running on PAL systems were the real speed (Understand, that's all they saw everywhere except at my place, so of course, to them, it was my system running too fast). I as just a kid but I loved everything about electronics and the such and used to read whatever I could about it, so long before having a games console, I knew of the differences in color standards and regions although me having an NTSC system was just by chance, so I did understand that games were supposed to run as they did on my console. So when I upgraded to my Megadrive (Genesis in Argentina) I was decided to buy a clone with NTSC support if I didn't find an NTSC original. What a surprise, the original Sega Genesis Model 2 in Argentina, do have the switches to select region and tv system, they don't need modding. So I got one of those and never played a game using PAL system.
The first 360 had no HDMI so there was still some 50 / 60hz fiddling to do at the start.
It had component video tho.
SMB that came with the original UK NES release (those units marked as MATTEL VERSION instead of NES VERSION) wasn't sped up like the version in your video. When my mates started getting NES consoles with the combo carts (I'm pretty sure Duck Hunt & SMB on the same cart) and we played the sped up version, it was freaky, especially the music sounding just plain wrong!
How's Neptune?
@@thegreathadoken6808 lovely and sunny! The ice cream van has just been so had a 99 to cool down.
The PAL-M system used here in Brazil is... strange. It uses the same resolution and frame rate as NTSC but the color coding is different, so our consoles didn't have the problem european consoles had in regards to speed, but an unmoded north american or japanese console would appear in black and white through RF, S-Video or Composite. Since Nintendo took 3 years to release the Super NES here a lot of people relied on VHS that had built in NTSC-PAL-M converters, then later dedicated converters and modded consoles with built in converters became common over here. In the mid ot late 90s it wasn't uncommon for TVs, specially the higher end models, to be compatible with NTSC signal as well.
What Super NES did you guys get in the end, was it the boxy American design?
We've got the "boring" boxy design, like in the US.
I can't argue with this anti-PAL treatise but I at least speak for myself when I say the real lure behind PAL gaming is the desire to play what was available in our own territory at the time - even if it resulted in an inferior experience. There is nostalgia at play here but there's a link with the past that is transportative in a way playing a US or Japanese game simply isn't.
PAL never really made much sense to me, as it had a lower frame rate and higher resolution at a time when TVs were relatively small and didn't get big fo many years later. So, you got a frame rate that was marginally worse for fast action like sports and video games and a resolution that was unhelpfully higher in regions where the houses were often times smaller than in NTSC America.
It also ensured that any of the content being created in America would have to be converted to something that those devices could handle, which was a bit of a pain as the resolution was higher than the source material coming out of the US and the frame rate also needed to be dropped to accomodate it.
star_parodius Magazines like Power Play in Germany informed us beforehand of the problem and so we imported US/jap consoles and cartridges.
One advantage Pal Regions had over US was the Scart RGB Cable which We never got from 1987 until the Dreamcast the best We had was S Video even Japan had Scart RGB so if You lived in America from 1987 to 1998 You got Screwed when it came to Image Quality.
In NTSC land, Sonic runs really really fast, while in PAL he runs "politely" fast lol. I always wondered if someone who grew up with a PAL console would just absolutely suck at games like Punch Out an Ninja Gaiden if they tried to play the NTSC version. I would imagine if would throw your timing off if you played it one way all your life. Anyone know why EU tvs only went to 50 hz in the first place?
The TV frequencies were synced to the power grid frequency (probably saved them some hardware in the early days but I think TVs had grid independent clocks by the time consoles arrived). The European power grid runs at 50Hz while the US grids run at 60Hz. A side effect was the earlier introduction of 100Hz TVs (that still show only 50 pictures per second but refresh their phosphor twice as often) in Europe than America since 50Hz produces a more severe flicker than 60Hz which was tough on the eyes. PC users would just dial their monitors to like 75Hz to deal with the flicker but TVs had to do multiples of their base frequency so it had to be 50 or 100.
I think some games are better PAL. Jurassic Park (Mega Drive) has music that seems to fit the tone of the game better, the same with Dune: Battle for Arrakis (Mega Drive).
I don’t recall Super Mario Bros having music that fast back in the day, but it explains why the music is also fast on the Wii Virtual Console version.
The PAL NES had a fixed bug with controller input not being properly detected during PCM playback.
And NES games weren't that bad when slower, but when lower pitched! It's why I can handle Dendy region games.
Just so you guys know, Brasil uses PAL/M, which is more similar to NTSC than PAL. It is 60Hz not 50Hz, so games here runs in the "normal" intended 60Hz speed.
It's a bit of an overreaction, if coded proper they can run just as fast as they have more bandwidth usually just a lower clock-rate for the lower frame-rate of the signal they use. Since Pal has a higher resolution, they do have slightly more bandwidth (when measured per frame) (or in the Megadrive A LOT more bandwidth per frame in DMA for some reason :P ). But the problem of "how fast a game runs" is entirely up to the coding. Since the frame rate is slower and the resolution higher, you also have more time per frame to run code. This should more than make it possible to run the game at the "same speed" for the player. the Animations just need to be "sped up" AKA. If an running animation takes 6 frames? It now would need to run in 5 frames.
That's it. if properly converted there is nor problem. But most were lazily converted. But lately you have been a person who has been doing a LOT of click bait, and .. it's not a good look for you my friend :) .As for instance: In the case of the Megadrive and Master system. Many of the games were made in European and South American Regions were PAL or SECAM was standard. And thus they ran fine. In fact due the the bandwidth (per frame) difference (for a Megadrive), such a game would sometimes be hard to port to the NTSC regions, especially in the case of the mega-drive, were BANDWIDTH and not CPU speed was the main factor of why the system could do so well. The higher bandwidth the system has, was one of the reasons it could keep up and often pass the SNES in some fields, heck the PAL/Secam console in some cases could have a stunning 50% per frame increase in bandwidth (per frame). Way more than what the extra few lines of resolution asked for. Now try adjusting for that, when you need to push for more frames per second, but per frame you have less bandwidth to deal with. Sure.. you have a lower resolution (and thus less to push through), but not 30% less :P.
Music is not affected on the SNES becasue it runs on a dedicated processor.
At least there were no hiccups due to differences between the AC cycles in various regions (USA we are 60Hz, and UK and most of EUR is 50Hz). In fact, in the Famicom's home country of Japan (which uses 100V) the eastern half of the grid (incl. Tokyo) uses 50Hz whereas the Western half (incl. Kyoto and Osaka) uses 60Hz.
As was correctly stated in the video, using RGB connections was really the way to go, so long as you had a monitor of the "Multisync" variety that allowed for various frame refresh rates (more specifically including 50 and 60 Hz). RGB also provided far superior color separation which further reduced color washing and provided cleaner, well delineated pixels.
Also mentioned in the video was the "why" as to region ports suffering poorly - often, when a game was developed at that time, it was not known whether the game would be successful in its home region, so the question of porting was almost always "if" and not "when". For us yanks, a typical NES game went for $40-$50 (alot of money today, even more back in the late 80's) and a good chunk of that price went towards the cartridge manufacture, which is unlike today where you buy a digital copy or one on disc which costs about a dollar to produce. Also, Big N required a company to have Nintendo themselves do the manufacture and required a minimum quantity purchase. When you start to add up these costs to produce a game in that era, it becomes clear why the game speed and porting issues weren't always addressed during development (which is where the easiest place to solve this challenge is).
Even in the modern era, our hi-def broadcast standards are not aligned (see ATSC vs. DVB), but at least the televisions and monitors all now use HDMI which allows for connected systems to negotiate resolution, frame rate, interlacing, audio and even color space (or "colour" space as the her majesty would have it) making those units damn near universal.
ah pal. where games are slower and movies and tv shows are faster
Depends on the TV show. If it was shot on video then it won't be faster.
Have to laugh at the fact that I realised holding down the left mouse button fast-forwards TH-cam videos on the segment about PAL being slower, of all places!
Brazil is Pal-M. Same resolution and 60hz as NTSC but with PAL color system
Love your content! Thanks!
Thanks for watching!
Nice work 👍😊
7:13 "Life-like 3D graphics" X-D
Mena Man 1 and 2 in PAL are not optimized at all. 3 , 4 and 5 only the music is optimized .
I’m in the UK and this exactly why, for the PAL consoles which only output 50hz, I also own the equivalent NTSC system. So I have a Famicom, Super Famicom and Sega Genesis. Thankfully the PAL PS1 and N64 consoles and onwards could also output 60hz, so I don’t need to own extra consoles for those.
By combining these with flash carts (or modded disc based consoles) I have easy access to Japanese and USA games so I can enjoy them all properly, full screen and 60hz.
Pal versions are still important if you want to play localized versions... And Pal versions are also often the last versions with bug fixes or extra content and less censorship than US versions.
What's funny is that Pal 100% non-optimized games are the best today on emulators because we only have to force 60Hz
One thing I really hate is that devs where lazy by not adjusting speed for 50hz and not using the extra screen space... But at least we had less slowdowns...
Great video. I discovered this when getting into retro in 2015. Was blissfully unaware as a UK gamer until I got a Cube in 2004 and suddenly got asked about 60hz on boot up. Dial forward and ps1 pal in 2015 was slow and bordered 😩. Every retro system after that I got NTSC Saturn, SNES, Genesis, NES, N64 etc. much better! To note though optimised pal games may well glitch if played on NTSC systems - see great randomised gaming article on the Saturn as an example
@Sharopolis: On Nintendo switch if you payed the expension pack for Nintendo switch only, if you used the NTSC app you have a choice to play the NTSC, or the Pal version of certain game in the N64 US version, not all the game have that, and the pal version of the app Europ and Australia, his just the NTSC version of the app with the same choices, since I grow-up with NTSC in Canada which is the same as US. it is kind of nice to experience what it would have been like to play Super mario 64 in Europe back then, and also Super mario 64 in Europe did have a feature that the US did not have language select, and also the Europeing French language is not censored, compare to the English version, the Expension pack including Sega genisis but no pal version choices in that one, and it also include what the base plan offers, and more currently. The Japanese side of the Expension pack is more of a rip off to me because Super mario 64 does have 2 diffrent version in Japan and they should at least match it with what happen with the US version, so they should have put both japanese version of Super mario 64 in the Japanese app. The Japanese side also have mega drive that is what the Sega genisis is called in Japan.
I agree PAL sucks for games developed abroad, but many European gamers also have nostalgia for the localised versions, i.e. games that show text in their own languages. US or Japanese releases won’t have those languages implemented, so there is no easy fix for this unfortunately.
Well i don't know about the language part almost all nes games only had English or Japanese versions even big languages like French or German where only supported by a small amount of games sold in the region sometimes even the manuals where not translated.
The Dreamcast has PAL 60Hz, unfortunately, most people were stuck with the jaggy DVD player and that's where the myth that consoles only do 30fps came from. And why most people think we only had 50Hz/25fps until the 7th gen despite all 3 non-Sony offerings giving us 60Hz like the rest of the world.
To add, the US China-made Dreamcasts fail more than the Indonesian-made PAL versions and Japanese Japan-made versions.
Same with China-made US PS2s and Japan-made ROW PS2s, I have 3 dead US PS2s, and a Japanese launch White one.
A modded Mega Drive losing its composite and RF video output really does demonstrate how strictly manufacturers adhere to the display standards.
NTSC uses a carrier signal of approximately 3.58MHz, where PAL uses 4.43MHz. Instead of using separate crystals, Sega used a single crystal at a much higher speed and then divided it to get the assorted clock rates. The NTSC video signal used a divider of 15, where PAL was a divider of 12. Of course if you multiply by those factors respectively then you'll find that you don't get exactly the same value for each - the NTSC master clock was approximately 1% faster at 53.693MHz instead of 53.203MHz (an up-tick supplied to all other hardware in the console). That variation is why a PAL console set to 60Hz mode won't work on many TVs, due entirely to the NTSC carrier signal being just under 1% slower than it should be.
These days there exists Dual Frequency Oscillators (DFOs), though availability isn't great post-Covid. And not just for the Mega Drive/Genesis, but also an assortment of other consoles like the original Playstation, the Saturn, and even the NES and SNES. These, paired with mod chips where appropriate, can allow PAL and NTSC consoles to happily toggle back and forth between the appropriate frequencies.
As an odd additional tid-bit, the four-lane setup of the Mega Drive region system means it's actually possible to configure a console in a PAL50 Japanese mode. It serves no purpose as no consoles were ever made in that config (it can even stop games from working), but it exists. You can also toggle the setting while the console is running to change language in some games - even part way through a scrolling message - but I don't recommend doing that.
When you're running contra side by side, at the moments the backgrounds sync up, they seem to be perfectly in time. Is this just my brain playing tricks?
So if I were to modify my PAL console to be region free, would an NTSC game run at its original framerate and speed?
on retro consols? no, pal runs slower because of the 50hz (instead of 60hz) electric network. so pal runs mostly at 25 instead of 30 fps. the devs of those games did some things to adjust the games for this, but mostly failed. pal consoles are (as far as I know) not designed to run on a 60hz grid(it might break), so 50hz it is. if you manage to make the console region free it would run to slow.
nintendos handhelds would run fine on each others games but are still region locked.
@@avocadoooo186I know that, but he mentions that the NTSC games would run at its original speed on n64 if you manage to get them working
@@marioboi323 as far as I know (and i am not an expert) you should be able to get ntsc n64 running though a european power supply (if you life in europe) because all n64s use 12v DC. If you also have an european ntsc-compatible TV and an ntsc game, then you should be able to run an ntsc-n64 in europe. But if you really want to try this, do your own research because you might (but as far as I know shouldnt) fry you console
You do have to change the oscillator on a PAL PS1. It won't run at a proper 60Hz without a compatible one.
I remember some PAL game on the PSX gave you the option to switch to 60hz if your TV supported it. I thought it was Tekken 3 but apparently not, anyone remember which game did that?
Must be some pirate release. Cracktros usually had video mode settings.
Given the hack for the mega drive, would the region free hack on the NES accomplish the same? If only for playing ntsc games?
back then, i remember almost every budget crt Television can run a sega dreamcast at 60 hz mode. but the expensive Loewe TV from my father can't handle this.
It's no wonder that PCs were used for gaming more in Europe than consoles.
Technically it's not about frames per second, but rather refresh rate which was tied to power line frequency.
Not really, consoles and tvs use direct current
@@LovroPlaninšek The TV screen refresh rates of 50 or 60 Hz had been chosen to coincide with the power line frequency so as to avoid interference effects between the flicker of the screen and the flicker of the overhead lightbulbs or fluorescent lights.
When US computers with 60Hz screens were introduced in 50Hz light Europe, the interference flicker gave office workers headaches, which led to "low flicker" standards for computing equipment such as "TCO Certified"
This is no longer a problem, as old tech has been replaced with LED _backlights_ ,LED lightbulbs and electronic fluorescent ballasts which all typically operate at higher frequencies that don't cause interference that the eye can catch.
I'm the proud owner of a Famicom HVC-001, Famicom HVC-101, Super Famicom (with Super Game Boy 1 & 2), Japanese Nintendo 64, North American GameCube (with Game Boy Player), Color TV-Game 15V, consolised Game Gear, North American Master System, 60Hz-modded Mega Drive 1, 60Hz-modded Mega Drive 2 with Mega CD 2 (NTSC BIOSs used) and Genesis 32X, 60Hz-modded Saturn, North American Dreamcast, North American PlayStation, North American PlayStation 2 slimline and North American original Xbox in Wales, UK :)
With UK power adapters / power supply mods and RGB and audio mods, Everdrives/multicarts and ODEs etc, played on an upscaled "PC-CRT" setup. The only system in the setup running at 50Hz is my Sega SC-3000 French RGB model 😄
15:31 😂😂😂
Personally I hated the letterboxing even more so than the slowness. But at the same time I had no idea about different TV standards and thought that it was just how home games were supposed to look like. The look and feel difference between home and arcade games was even more noticeable in Europe.
Consoles and computers by European companies were not so much affected by this because they and their games were designed to work with PAL from the ground up. NES SMB was sped up for the Wii VC PAL version - and the clock runs down much faster than the NTSC version! The AGA Amiga's can switch between 60 and 50hz at boot, many Amiga games had a 60hz option - especially the cracked pirate copies - likewise with the ST. @6:46 shouldn't happen if your TV is multi-system. I only experience the B&W picture with NTSC composite on a TV that's PAL only.
The PAL Super Mario All-Stars gets the music and sound effects fixed, but gameplay may still be slower depending on the game.
Depends on the console - PAL is obviously has a sharper picture, once you go 3D it makes a difference. Also DVD - PAL is superior
As an Australian, when i was a kid i obviously had no idea so it made zero difference to the enjoyment. Later down the track and after collecting till the PS2 i found out the difference. Thats when i started getting into emulation and was completely turned off from building my collection. These days im only interested in NTSC format for oldschool gaming. I find emulation suits my needs more anyway. Family man and havent the same amount of time anymore to be farting around with my old consoles
All that said, if you're buying an Atari 7800, go for the European model. It comes with a lot better controllers and has Asteroids built in.
I would also say that I actually find the borders on old PAL games worse than the slower speed. I can get used to the slower speed (if I don’t compare it to the NTSC version!) but the huge borders are really off putting. They make the aspect ratio all wrong too. The SNES seems to be worse than the Mega Drive, I assume because of the different resolutions they run at? Equinox on the PAL SNES is the worst culprit for borders from what I’ve seen. They’re huge, bigger than other PAL games! The NTSC game is full screen so I don’t know why this game suffers more than others.
Most crts allow you to adjust the screen size through service menus or potmeters though. Kind of a bother to have to stretch the screen to the appropriate size every time you switch console(because all of em seem to warp/displace the image differently) but on most tvs its a fixable issue. The speed though you cant do anything about ever without modifying the console.
Well I still do have all my consoles staring from my Mattel Nes. But if I ever do get back into collecting games, I'd probably get a chiped Nes or Famicom.
I live in the USA, and the only experience I've had with this sort of thing is when I tried running PAL games on a modded PS2. My TV hated it.
I like more pal nes than ntsc and I had the both console options.
it only happens with cheap conversions and relying on frame rates instead of doing it properly - if the tv and game supported it, you could play 60hz post 16bit era which was still the 90s and pre hdmi, they made tv's refresh that were independent of the electric system, 50/60/100hz in at least 94 if not before
Re: N64 - Playing Blast Corps? Yeah nah you want that one in PAL. Already a hard game but it was unintentionally sped up for NTSC.
The bootleg NES clones like Pegasus and Dendy solved this problem by simply running at the NTSC speed and passing the video output through a built-in converter to work on PAL displays, as they were aimed at the east-european market, which means that they can perfectly run imported Famicom cartridges.
It wasn't until years later that I realised how badly gypped we were in the UK. Not only did we get a slower, letter-boxed experience, we paid more for it than the US or Japan! But what you didn't know, you didn't know.
I'm pretty sure I played Contra (with the Rambo dudes) in PAL machines in the houses of a couple different friends, and I'm pretty sure they had original NES, not Famiclones (out of all of my acquaintances and before the launching of the N64, I only met one guy who had a Famiclone, but not a NES-on-a-chip version, although he still called it "Nintendo"; later my cousins got two different NES-on-a-chip Famiclones, but that was in the 2000s). I may have played Probotector in the house of another friend, but I'm not sure. I wonder how could that be possible.
I have used PAL consoles and found them OK. I did play NTSC games through adapters and not notice the speed difference. Probably due to being played on the PAL machines.
Contrary to this video I always get PAL by default, for everything of this period.
Also, remember: most of the Master System catalogue was PAL.
If there is a speed difference, there is an error in programming. Things are usually easy to fix with a couple of multipliers. Never programmed a game yourself? Sure, there will have been lazy conversions, but who decides what's the right speed? Would be very strange to hear pitch differences, the sound chip should run its own frequency as the output is analog and in no way related to screen refresh. I also miss the effect of other differences, like the resolution. PAL is 576 lines where NTSC is 480 lines. What did that do to the visuals?
It is all about the Point Of View. No right or wrong here.
To be honest, this entire vid comes off as unnecessarily harsh - I don't argue that the percentage drop makes a massive difference, but the attitude of 'your PAL consoles and games are all trash' is a little too savage. Oh well, at least all of my old systems will happily run on my old CRT *and* look how they're supposed to - horses for courses, I suppose. 🤷♀
I thought it was pretty balanced. All this was fine back in the day but now that we have a choice almost all games should be played as NTSC.
Could have been remedied alot earlier if every tv in Europe had external inputs rather than worrying about rf connection that all these consoles were equipped with in the box.
The single best pal optimised game I know of is Virtual Fighter 2 on the Saturn.
PAL did offer benefits over NTSC though, it has a slightly higher vertical resolution and handles colour better meaning less fringing and banding. Should mention the problem existed in the first place because of the different power outputs, PAL regions use 220v - 240v @ 50hz, NTSC regions use 110v - 130v @ 60hz, it was simply easier and cheaper to match the output frequency to the input frequency.
Very few games took advantage of the higher vertical resolution. A re-release revision of Super Mario World (PAL v1.1) was one of the few and it STILL had letterboxing with proper screen alignment. The better colour is only a real issue with tv broadcasts because of how broadcast signals were handled. There isn't that kind of difference between how a PAL or NTSC console outputs a video signal.
@@hankhill7827 That's simply not true. Forgive me, I'm no expert and I forget the exact reasons why but from memory, NTSC was used before colour TV was a thing at all and they kinda forced the colour signal in to the existing signal, PAL was created after colour TV was a standard and was designed with colour in mind from the outset. It is something to do with luma and chroma but as i say, the exact reason eludes me. I can say 100% that I've seen people who do know the reasons talk about it in the context of 8/16 bit machines and Adrian Black has demonstrated it a few times using NTSC & PAL C64s.
@@dungeonseeker3087 I know what you are talking about, colour subcarriers, and I agree that PAL is better at that because it has a wider frequency. But this doesn't factor into most consoles especially when they can output an RGB signal. RGB essentially bypasses the PAL/NTSC colour system and beams the raw data numbers into the electron guns in the TV. The situation with the Commodore is probably because it uses RF or composite cables.
@@hankhill7827 Yeah, this seems to be a case of yet another regional difference, Over here in PAL land RGB was not common at all until the early 00s (ish) outside of monitors, our TVs ran exclusively on RF right up until the mid 90s when we got component in the form of SCART. Essentially even going up to the 32 bit era everything we had ran on either RF or Component, I'm 99% sure the first consoles we got with RGB support baked in were the PS2 & OG Xbox. RGB was a thing for Amigas though, even going back to the A500 you either needed an RGB monitor or a huge module that hung off the back of the system and converted it to RF.
This is why if I were to start collecting NES/SNES/Megadrive games I'd rather get an NTSC console, whether it's Japanese or American
The biggest problem with the PAL NES and SNES is that it barely got any of the legendary RPGs.
Why?
Isn't it just half of Japan that use the 60hz and in Europe pal we get more resolution
Japan is split on 50 and 60Hz power, but the TV refresh rate was the same.
Few consoles and home computers offered higher resolution in PAL: they got more vertical border instead.
@@FindecanorNotGmail PAL PS2 owner here. When I select 50hz mode, I get less speed and more resolution in games. The reverse is true if I select 60hz.
@@FindecanorNotGmail ntsc has 525 lines and pal has 625 nearly 20% more lines. I thought. Phase alternating line is still better than secam 🤣