Sonic 1 - 50Hz vs 60Hz (PAL vs NTSC) - An informative comparison
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ค. 2024
- My Discord server: discord.redhotsonic.com
This is Sonic 1: 50Hz Vs 60Hz! Where I take a quick look and compare both Sonic 1 at its original NTSC speed (JP), and its slower counterpart, PAL (EU). There are many disadvantages to 50Hz when you compare it to its colleague 60Hz, but are there any benefits? To find out, I got the EU Megadrive and my JAP Megadrive out and gave it a comparison. I used both versions of Sonic 1 for this. The European version vs the Japanese version to represent its speed (not that it matters what version of the game I use).
Playlist: • Sonic 50Hz Vs 60Hz ser...
Sonic 1 - 50Hz Vs 60Hz: You're here already!
Sonic 2 - 50Hz Vs 60Hz: • Sonic 2 - 50Hz vs 60Hz...
Sonic 3 - 50Hz Vs 60Hz: • Sonic 3 - 50Hz vs 60Hz...
Sonic Mania - 50Hz Vs 60Hz: • Sonic Mania - 50Hz vs ...
Subscribe to my TH-cam channel! th-cam.com/users/redhotson...
Sponsor me and receive some goodies! More information can be found here: www.redhotsonic.com/#sponsor
redhotsonic's website: www.redhotsonic.com/
Discord Server invitation link: discord.redhotsonic.com/
Twitter: / redhotsonic_rhs
Facebook: / redhotsonic
Google+: plus.google.com/+redhotsonic/
PayPal: paypal.me/redhotsonic
SSRG Forums: sonicresearch.org/community/
Sonic Retro Forums: forums.sonicretro.org/
Sonic in the thumbnail on the right was created by nikfan01 and thanks to darththelonius for letting me borrow his EU Megadrive. - เกม
The "widescreen" effect is due to the PAL version not using the full 240 lines it allows*; Sonic 1-3&K only use 224 lines, the same which NTSC allows*. This adds 16 more lines of border on PAL version. Moreover, the image takes up the whole screen (vertically speaking), so it is effectively stretched in NTSC compared to PAL - or rather, it is effectively squashed in PAL, considering the game was developed for NTSC.
* = there are actually more lines than this in actual PAL/NTSC, but they are all border lines in MD/Genesis, and are generally not used in most cases because they end up in overscan region.
+flamewing I knew I got a little mixed up somewhere. Thanks for the tip!
redhotsonic k
Nice video. I never realized the rest of the world were playing at the faster 60Hz version, until I saw playthroughs on TH-cam, and then played my old copy! Amazing how I put up with it. All my Sonic 1 videos are the 60Hz version anyway.
Thanks again.
Anto RetroGamer Sonic 1 is much better on NTSC-J as that version has better graphics
+Anto RetroGamer NTSC is dumb go pal any day.
The best part about being in Australia was waiting longer to pay three times more than everyone else to play a game at a slower speed.
Didn't AUS TVs had 30fps (which is basically 60hz)?
Fancy Second Channel no. 50hz for power, 50hz pal, 25.something fps
Fancy Second Channel
i recently bought a megadrive, and its definitely slower than what im used to.
At least pretty much all AUS CRT TV's could display NTSC 60HZ with no problems, even strange formats like PAL60 and NTSC 4.43 typically worked.
Makes me think that if the knowledge was out there you very well could've imported an NTSC Megadrive back in1991. All you needed was a power converter and a top range CRT tv capable of 60hz display.... In fact, most of the Sony Trinitrons were 50hz but still ran in 60hz without distortion.
As a kid in the UK growing up playing a lot of videogames, I wondered why the modern remasters of these games went faster than I remembered. That's when I realized the 50/60Hz difference between PAL and NTSC. I vaguely recall in the PS2 era when games would advertise a 50/60Hz option.
They say when you get older, time feels like it's speeding up, and this Hertz difference helped contribute to that notion 🤔
Great video. I grew up playing the PAL versions of Sonic as a child, and when I finally played the full-speed version in my late teens I remember thinking "wow, I really suck at this, but I remember the zone layouts perfectly, what gives?". The music being faster than I remember is what led me to find out about the difference between the regions, it's such an interesting technical novelty! Kind of bruised my ego too though, I thought I was just amazing at the game, turns out I'd been playing with a speedhack all those years.
Also, I think Robotnik's theme sounds so much more menacing in the 50hz version, I think most of the music sounds better slowed down slight tbh, but then that's probably due to me hearing it played slow for hundreds of hours as a child.
I'll give people the title theme, Special Stage, and Green Hill, but I think most of the other tracks sound just as good, if not better in 50Hz. Star Light Zone sounds fantastic slowed down, and both Scrap Brain and Final Zone sound super menacing which is really fitting.
And Sonic 1 GBA ran on 2 Hz 😂
Your name made me cringe.
I am simply following my programming. K
Yours makes me cringe even more XD
I am simply following my programming.+ yours confused me
Bi Mountain Dew Kitty // Oliver Purrings I think you mean 0.0000000000000000000001Hz
A curious fact:
In Brazil, all consoles are NTSC, but our TV system is PAL-M. Despite the name, it is actually closer to NTSC than to PAL. An excerpt from Wikipedia:
"It is unique among analog TV systems in that it combines the 525-line 30 frames-per-second System M with the PAL color encoding system (using very near the NTSC color subcarrier frequency), unlike all other countries which pair PAL with 625 -line systems and NTSC with 525-line systems. "
So, the brazilian (and argentinean, chilean, paraguayan & uruguayan) games and consoles are, technically, the same as the north american ones.
I agree that PAL-M is closer to NTSC, even without much techknowledgy (anyone? Eh??? Was that clev--nah, forget it) about them. I've used link cables connecting a driver of NTSC before, perfect. PAL, it becomes black and white and scrolls up and down infinitely (some kind of aspect problem, frames, resolution or whatnot). But when I set to PAL-M, here in the USA, I'm getting a perfect picture, just in monochrome. It's not even noticeable if I'm watching a black-and-white movie. Like Village of the Damned :D
Leonardo Meira In other words NTSC but now running in higher resolution!
Actually, only our older CRT TVs are PAL-M. Brazilian TVs are tri-system, which support NTSC, PAL and PAL-M.
Older consoles manufactured here in Brazil aren't NTSC. Our Sega Master System is PAL-M, which still runs at 60Hz.
Good to know. I'm brazilian and had a Mega Drive back in the day and sorta "know" that our Screen Default was Pal, but my Sonic 1 game wasn't that slow...
is for electricity, in countries with NTSC or NTSC-M, 110volts and 60Hz are used, in countries with PAL or PAL-N it is used 220volts and 50Hz, but in Brazil PAL-M is used because they use 220volts and "60Hz"
Thankfully some games were optimized for 50Hz, allowing the music to play at a more accurate tempo, same with gameplay. Unfortunately all games didn't get the optimization treatment. It's pretty crazy that Sonic of all games didn't get a proper 50Hz optimization.
The other Sonic games from Sonic 2 onward had proper optimisation.
Nah they were all trash. Look at ps classic.
@@maxpower10k You're getting your facts wrong here, same with the other comment. The PAL situation is/was more complex than most Americans think, and so many of them still think it's the same since the NES/Master System and Atari days. This is ignorance. The vast majority of PAL games on PS1 are optimised and run at the same speed as US/Jpn versions, and with the PS Classic they also run at the 60Hz refresh rate (not that there's a huge diff - definitely not enough to say 'trash'). Try it for yourself, put on ISOs of the same game on a hacked PS1 classic, one PAL version, one NTSC. You won't find a difference, except maybe that the PAL version offers more languages and possible bugfixes/additions because they were released later (usually). Refresh rates and colour differences are a thing of the past, and these days you can also do something about the higher resolution PAL offered but most games didn't make use of.
@@WhiteboyUltima Yeah, it's all over the place.
I wouldn't call it optimisation though.
It's a simple timing fix.
I learnt game programming in the late 90's and the standard practice on PC by then was to use a system timer to work out how long any given frame was and do stuff like movement, physics and the like proportional to that length.
That means that the game runs at the same speed no matter the framerate.
The game logic will be the same whether the game is running 5 fps or 500.
The problem with consoles and older computers however, is that frequently game developers simply assumed the framerate was a constant. (sometimes they had no choice because the systems had no way of timing anything independent of the framerate)
that means if the framerate changes, so does the speed the game runs at. (this is part of why old games had 'slowdown', not just choppier framerates where everything still kinda moved at the expected speed.)
The problem here should be obvious.
It's not that there's anything wrong with 50 hz, or that you need to 'optimise' anything (As in try and get it to run better)
It's a simple matter of timing.
The game code says something like: (not a real example)
Sonic can run 10 pixels per frame.
The intended behaviour here is that Sonic runs 600 pixels a second.
Had this been coded using a modern technique (or on PC in general), the code would literally say something to the effect of 'speed = 600 pixels/second'
And then somewhere else the game determines how many milliseconds a frame took and thus how many pixels to move.
The problem with hard-coding to the framerate however, is that the code instead says something like
Sonic can run 10 pixels per frame, and this is never specified in terms of time.
The game code just assumes the framerate is 60 fps...
So on a 60 hz system this gives the intended result of 600 pixels/second of movement.
But drop to 50 hz and this is not 500 pixels/second.
The correct way to 'fix' this ahead of time, obviously is to use actual time measurements.
But the way to fix a release for PAL without fundamentally fixing the problem is to find every piece of code that somehow has a time based constant, and adjust it appropriately.
In this case, we change the code that says Sonic runs 10 pixels a frame to instead say he runs 12 pixels a frame.
Now the speed is as intended 600 pixels/second.
Some games did this, some didn't.
Mario Kart in fact does do this properly, but many do not.
(you might also ask why Sonic has slow music, which they 'fixed' for later versions, yet SNES games never had this music problem. The key point here is that music on the 16 bit consoles was handled by it's own CPU. Since the SNES Audio CPU ONLY did music, it simply ran at exactly the same speed no matter which version of the hardware you had. The Mega Drive unfortunately, does it's music with the Z80 CPU that is also used for Master System games through the power base converter. Since this has to run PAL master system games correctly, it too has to be adjusted to run at the slower speed...)
A final point: The 'faster' version is not always the 'correct' version.
This can be seen with the home computers which were much more popular in Europe than the US and thus had a lot of European developers.
Run the majority of c64, Amiga, Atari ST, Sinclair spectrum or even Atari 800 games at 60 hz, and you're doing it wrong. like 80-90% of these games were developed by Europeans ON PAL hardware, and if the NTSC version runs faster this is a mistake, just as much as the PAL console games running slower would be.
Unfortunately there's no conclusive way to prove which speed is correct for most games.
The best we have to go on most of the time is who developed it.
If the developer was from Japan, the US, or Canada, it was almost certainly designed for 60 hz hardware.
If the developer was from Europe, Australia or a few other places, then there's a high probability the 50hz version is 'correct'. And this is especially true for home computers.
For consoles this is a little fuzzier because console devs in Europe were more likely to actually think about overseas markets (especially the US)...
Still, more often than not we'll never know with absolute certainty which speed was intended if there are multiple options available...
@@KuraIthys Wow thank you for the detailed explanation! I am glad you chimed in :)
This was really interesting! I wondered why our Megadrive was running so slowly...
NTSC is 60hz pal is 50hz. So sum thing running at 60hz would not display correctly or at all on a pal format tv form what i understand. Also the games speed was defined by the frame rate witch is why it run slowly. The PlayStation One suffered from the same 50hz pal problem
Because sonic is to fast
@@zool8139 sonic 1 is the only sonic game to really suffer from this problem, because Sega were lazy and didn't optimise it for PAL regions despite them having the most success in PAL regions (like Europe and Brazil where the master system had outsold the NES, and the mega drive had WAY outsold the SNES)
But yeah for sonic 2 and 3 they optimised it for PAL, so despite running at 50hz, they're basically the same as the NTSC 60HZ ones. The same speed, but with a slightly lower frame rate. And the problem of the music being too slow is gone too.
I never noticed any of this as a kid. I never noticed how sonic 2 and 3&K were so much faster than sonic 1. They all just seemed to be the same speed to me
But yeah when I years later downloaded all the soundtracks to the sonic games to listen to in Winamp, all the sonic 1 songs sounded ridiculously fast. That's when I first discovered that we'd been kinda ripped off in PAL regions. We bought a game advertised almost entirely on how fast it was, and yet we got a super slow version that's actually slower than the Mario games of the time. Nobody cares though. I was only 5, so probably it was for the best that the first ever game I played in my life, Sonic 1, was super slow, as a way to introduce me to the world of gaming. A training game, like training wheels on a bike.
@@duffman18 i have a feeling it’s because either sega didn’t know how to optimize for PAL regions, or they couldn’t because of time constraints and deadlines. i thought sonic was faster than mario at 50hz?
@@duffman18 the PAL on Brazil uns diferent, the game dont slow
"The PAL version" is a misnomer in this case. The data on the cartridges is bit-for-bit identical between US and European releases! Japan got a slightly later revision which added a couple fancy graphical effects, and one single extra ring in Labyrinth Zone Act 1 to make it possible to take the shortcut and still access the special stage.
He more or less says that at 1:43. I guess it's simply quicker to say "PAL version" rather than "running on a PAL console".
Are those JP fancy effects in all later collections
Suddenly as a UK gamer I feel cheated.
DGneoseeker1 same
Australians used pal too so good work on feeling cheated when you're not the only one's with it
I was so shocked years after growing up with these games that Americans and Japanese people always played a quicker version. Also it made sense as to why back then I always got a Time Over on Launch Base Zone but I never do these days. Because the seconds still counted the same, but getting through the level took longer because of the slowness. I'm so used to 60hz sonic now that going back to play the actual UK version just feels wrong
@@duffman18 I could not agree more
@@duffman18 the difference was only noticeable in Sonic the Hedgehog 1 not the others.
Gotta go slow!
Will The Person More like Gotta Go at a walking pace!
Gotta go somewhat fast lol
S
L
O
W
Slow
What a terrible phrase.
@@pferreira1983 what a terrible reply, for a joke...
From sonics point of view its 20Hz
Thats why hes so impatient.
To explain the slower music in 50 HZ, the game's sound driver wasn't optimized for 50 HZ in PAL.
The PXP3, when playing in PAL mode, even makes some games' sound that WAS optimized for 50 HZ play slower. Guess the sound driver on there could use some work XD
The worst example is streets of rage 3 pal, ugh the tempo of the music is all over the place
To optimize it
You need 68k to be converted as Z80 to make the music play normal
@@Bro-cx2jc that happens on a real (region modded) Mega Drive/Genesis if you boot in 60Hz but then switch to 50Hz, as opposed to booting in 50Hz.
@@RWL2012 That's not what the PXP3 does though
I always enjoy comparison videos. The speed ones in particular are really helpful for those that weren't aware of the alternative setting because they are used to what they know and whilst growing up.
I was so used to 50Hz, but I only prefer it with the original music. Any other song used (like in Sonic hacks) just sounds too slow.
I agree about quicker reaction times, which is why in my recordings, I play on the PAL setting. Funny enough, in Sonic 2, although you can make the emulator slightly slower in 50Hz, compared to 60Hz, but it wasn't as slow, like Sonic 1.
Overall, really enjoyed this topic using many examples of the game in both speed settings.
Your voice is so soothing!
No wonder I enjoy your videos.
austin ikr
Very interesting video, this actually informed me about a lot of things which will definitely help. Thanks a bunch for the awesome video!
4:50 You CAN skip it. Just hold A, B and C together.
I didn't even know that
I grew up with thr NTSC version, since that's what Canada uses, so 60 Hz is the norm for me.
It was during the summer of '97, some family from the U.K. came to visit. My cousin, who had a Mega Drive, was absolutely blown away with how fast Sonic moved on the Genesis. He struggled so much with the controls, and, in frustration, asked me why my Genesis games were so much faster than his Mega Drive games. I had no idea what he was talking about!
It wasn't until my dad explained to us that North America and the United Kingdom use different broadcast standards, and that a game originally programmed for NTSC that's converted for the PAL region will look and play slower than its original counterpart. That is, unless the game developers did a 60 Hz-50 Hz conversion while localising it.
So, ten years later, when I went to visit my cousin, I brought up the subject, as a "hey, do you remember when" discussion. He did. He dusted off his Mega Drive, plugged it in, put Sonic 1 in, and it all made sense to me!
Happy 100k views Red! You will always be the best!
50Hz looks like solid color background on an old Windows XP computer
Great video.
Just like you I didn´t know about the difference in speed when I was younger. It wasn´t until the Gamecube era when you got the option to choose between 50Hz and 60Hz and holy shit was that an eye opener.
I have a pal megadrive but I still love it. Thank for showing the differences!
Something similar (though less extreme, and in reverse) happens with films, which are 24Hz; the smoothest way to do a 50Hz conversion is to just play it back 1fps faster. Often the audio isn't pitch corrected and once you notice it it becomes the most distracting thing ever. Fortunately Blu-rays and VoD are usually the 24Hz originals.
mrchips2301 It Hertz! I can't look! Poor UK gamers!
Wow... And every region got a 60Hz, but depending on the "box" it's on, can down-clock it? This is the first 1:1 I've seen! Thank you for the upload and knowledge!
It really is astonishing how much slower we had it, isn't it? Especially since I can remember so keenly how pulse-blastingly fast it felt the first time I played it in a shop... I wonder if they had a 60hz display model?
Actually though, I rather like the 50hz version for a few reasons. I think the graphics look slightly better (probably nostalgia speaking, but don't the circles look slightly more circular to you? I find the 60hz version looks a bit too tall) - some of the musical tracks are way less messy when you slow them down, like Star Light and Sprng Yard, they feel so laid-back and cool, which is part of what Sonic was all about...
...or was it? I thought so, at the time, but now he has this "HEY KEED GOTTA GO FAST" reputation that I don't remember feeling so strongly at the time. I actually have a pet theory that the slower game is partly responsible for Sonic's higher popularity here compared to America. When you feel like you're supposed to just blast through the level, that's all you do, and it hardly means anything. But when you feel like you're playing a laid-back game where you move at a pace more suited to exploration, then you really get into the granular details of what's in the level, and you see more of what it has to offer
Well said my friend.
A minor advantage is that on American NTSC the colors looked different which the Brainscratch team emulated, and made Sonic look lighter along with the entire game. PAL kept the colors the way it was meant to look (and what emulators show when emulating NTSC screens
Nice work mate, keep it up :)
Great video!
That was an awfully informative video for such a topic! (In all the good ways, obviously.)
+Selbi Inkille Yeah, I did babble on a bit, didn't I? I've edited the title a little so people know what they're about to endure =P
redhotsonic
You got me wrong there, I really did mean that as a good thing. Guess "awfully informative" has an unwanted side tone to it. :V
You did good on your game Red.^__^!?
Selbi Inkille
Playing Sonic Erazor with an Everdrive on an european MD is also easier. Because of the reaction time ;)
So you openly admit to be cheating. :P
love this type of videos.
Thanks for making this video because I thought there was something wrong with my console
In my opinion the 50Hz makes you appreciate the soundtrack a bit more, atleast Greenhill zone's theme
Maybe because it's so iconic, Green Hill might be the most egregious because most of us have heard it reused a lot elsewhere, but I still like the PAL variant, and not just because of nostalgia. I think slowing it down a bit emphasises certain parts of the song, and the "breakdown" portion almost gives a dark undercurrent to the happy theme that foreshadows what happens later in the game with how much more ominous levels become.
@@EuroMIX2 seriously couldn't have put into better words myself
The geek thing to do at that period was to get a 60hz RGB Megadrive in Europe, recent TVs in the 90s were capable of 60hz. That was the graal, RGB 60hz :-)
This explains why when i went back to classics, they didn't fell right, now i get why lol I been returning to the NTSC versions haha!
A few months ago, I went to a pub that had a Mega Drive and Sonic 1. As I find it difficult to socialise, that's what I did for a pub gathering. I was kind of worried that it would throw me off because it's been years since I played the PAL version and was used to how the NTSC version played due to all the ports. I blazed through the game with barely any issues because of the positives you mentioned. I would've completed it if we all didn't disband before I did so lmao
Sega should have just make the Speed Shoes always enabled in the PAL version. Problem solved! :P
I bought a Mega SG recently, and I'm so glad it lets me play my Mega Drive cartridges at the proper speed.
I personally have a 60Hz-modded 1991 PAL Sega Mega Drive Model 1 VA4 (HDG-SS, non-TMSS) on which I play both retail game cartridges (including the Genesis copies of the games where necessary) and ROMs from my Mega Everdrive X7, on a JVC CRT broadcast monitor connected with S-video converted from RGB SCART :)
I'm eternally grateful to Analogue for including a ''PAL 50Hz'' setting in the Mega SG, two in fact, the export one we all know about and a special ''domestic one'' with Japanese language. The fact that Analogue a manufacturer from Seattle Washington North America thought of everybody and didn't exclude PAL users is something I am eternally grafeful for and it puts the official Sega mega Drive Mini in 2019 by Sega to shame, that thing never had a PAL setting in it's options and was not a true representation of what the original PAL Mega Drive was like and redhotsonic even pointed this out in one of his live streams (think it was Sonic 1 & 2 in PAL). So glad I never bought that thing, so disapointing to know that it doesn't behave in the way the console originally did in 1990, every option should always be available in this day and age and a PAL 50Hz setting should always be included (even if the vast majority never use it). I'm proud to own a Mega SG and always play it on the PAL setting. Gotta go fart lol.
Great video! It's also worth noting that trying to run a PAL European copy of sonic 1 @ 60hz will make it have glitches and slowdown. Sonic 2 is fine when this is done but the original doesn't like it, same with sonic 3 as that's already optimised for the best speed.
well, the european and american release is exactly the same (same ROM image), so the problem lies in modded PAL Mega Drive console
i am really, really glad i didn't know about 50/60 differences back then
3:46 Huh, the spring art loads in after the fade in. That's a bit of an oversight that I can't say I ever noticed before.
I definitely see this bro's point in 50 vs 60. A very easy way to immediately see the difference is to buy a PXP3 Slim Station (only a specific version actually has this unique feature, and mine is one of those) and play Sonic The Hedgehog on it. Unlike some of the other games, this one plays in 50 Hz on the device. However, if you plug in and then unplug the AV jack, it switches to 60. Although if you plug the jack back in, it'll go back to 50. It always remains at 50 Hz as long as the jack stays in, so for TV display it has to be 50 Hz.
I played for a while on 50 till I got to Marble Zone, lost a life, then gave my PXP3 a quick AV shock, and when the game jumped to 60 Hz, I felt like the device had been struck by lightning XD I could barely even keep up with what was going on. Spinning downhill totally, like, threw me out of proportion! Getting used to 50 Hz is possible, but when you make a sudden leap to 60, it does a number on you. Lol
I genuinely didn't know you COULD "defeat" the Labyrinth Zone boss until I watched your "Let's Try Robotnik's Revenge" video and heard you mention it. Which was what I just came here from. And I call myself a Sonic fan.
I believe in the original, the Labyrinth Zone boss has 99 hits instead of 8 hits before he can be defeated. So technically, he can't be defeated (and if you cheat to reduce this number, all he does is follows the same pattern as before).
"Robotnik's Revenge" changes this to 8 hits, because the idea is to beat the bosses as quick as possible.
@@RadioTails Are you saying the rom redhotsonic is using for the comparison isn't the original PAL Sonic 1? I'm finding several tutorial videos on how to defeat him, and they seem to be on the NTSC version, so I kinda doubt it. And from the way he talked about it in the video, I strongly got the impression that he was referring to playing this game as a kid, when saying he could land all 8 hits about 50% of the time.
Because of this, I'm happy I grew up in America.
PAL is better than NTSC.
I actually find the “ Floatiness” To actually be a good thing, it makes jumps so much easier. On 60 Hz, a jump I would otherwise complete in one attempt takes me three tries (Mega collection (ps2) uses the 50 Hz version, that’s how I know this)
You are correct. Some people failed a few times in 60hz, it was not until Star Light Zone they can get all emeralds but they can get all of the emeralds before Star Light Zone Act 3.
Now it all makes sense 🤔
Oh Wow, glad I wasn’t subjected to this torture (except for the Labyrinth Zone boss). 😅
The same thing happened when we Brits first got Tomb Raider on the PS1 (funny since it was developed here) - it ran at 50hz and so the entire game kinda felt like it might have been taking place on the moon, everything was so floaty.
They fixed it for the TR2 release, making all versions run at the same speed
I can't play this in 60hz, it's too fast. PAL all the way for me.
As a french dude who grew up playing both Sonic and Mario, I have two things to say. After getting my hands on a way to experiance the propper 60 hertz Sonic, there only are two things I still like in the 50 hertz, the very slow music of spring yard zone sounds really swingy jazzy to me, I love that long intro, I don't know why, for the rest of the ost, it makes it almost suck... and bosses, I can't not die on 60 hertz bosses, but 50 hertz bosses, cake walk, so no rage, equals more fun, except that I preffer the 60hertz speed inside the levels so much more I'm totally willing to rage and lose lives on bosses.
If I remember orrectly, Nintendo modified some of it's games in 50hertz to get them to behave more closly to the 60hertz, they artificially sped some of them up to get the proper speed, changed a bit the physics to have something more comfortable, changed slightly some ennemies behavior for them not not be just A: too fast for themselves and B: to slow to react to you, Mario got the speed and physics changed for sure, Zelda got the ennemies tweaked for sure, because Zelda is slower, the ennemies takes more time to reach you when they dash toward your face, but I feel like they tend to do it sooner and see you more easily, but they fall for the same tricks, which are easyer to do because the whole thing is slower. But what I'm saying have to be verified, I haven't touched my Snes and Genesis for like, a decade.
2:05 I chiped off the sides of the cart slot on my Genesis to play a handful of Japanese games I bought with a nail clipper, games worked perfectly.
Oh! Thats why my Sonic 1 was running so slow, it was killing me back in my childhood.
I had a Japanese megadrive that one of my relatives sent me when I was younger and since sonic was one of the games that came with it I never actually played the pal version when I was a kid
3:45 I just noticed the springs initially look glitched and look like the debug items you can place in Special Stages. Speaking of that, what are those items? Some stand still, some jump away like flickies, but Sonic can't interact with them, but they look like the graphics that gitchy spring has.
"The majority of the world had NTSC."
No, I think it was just North America and Japan that had NTSC.
Canada too.
@@Ilovecats1236 Fun fact Canada is in North America = D
I just noticed the objects and stuff at 60Hz are slightly larger than 50hz
7:27 "BOLLOCKS!" 😂
Great capture quality, framemeister? :|
There is something pretty nostalgic about playing the PAL version I've known as a kid. I just like the way it sounded back then. Sometimes, I just go back to the PAL version and play it even if I know the game's going to be pretty slow compared to the Japanese release I got used to since I've started training for speedrunning.
I might pick and choose on some of the tracks, but almost ideally I'd like to have the 60Hz gameplay with 50Hz music. Star Light Zone alone sounds better slowed down and suits the zone more IMO.
This is why I bought a MEga SG. Play all my PAL cartridges at the proper speed.
And this is why you don't program stuff to execute during render Frames, apart from input.
funny how a simple change in Hz can make such a difference
red i have a very important question, that is does sonic 1 master system has this pal and ntsc diferences?
Whoops some one forgot to use a converter on the pal Megadrive with the JAPANESE Sonic cartridge!
*Ha! ha! ha!*
I actually like the slower Green Hill Zone theme. It's got a nice relaxing quality to it.
Sonic having a stroke. Grew up playing PAL-M (60hz), but now that I live in Europe, playing at 50hz (with a AtGames machine, no less), it's unberable
Can you talk about Sonic 1 on GBA & Mobile App Game?
was this issue was only on Megadrive? Snes Pal Super Mario World plays the same as NTSC Super MArio World.
Despite living in Europe I was first used to the NTSC version when I was very young so when I played the PAL version later I thought my system was broken.
9:20 Godlike timing
I don't mind music being given space & pauses but with the Sonic 1 conversion it's just too slow cause the NTSC speed was already well suited for the Music & Mechanics !
There is only one version of the Sonic 1 ROM chip. Probably to save money early on in the Mega Drive life most games had a universal ROM chip and only the settings on the console made a difference. Even most of the console was the same across all regions. You can mod a Mega Drive easily to change between all three regions with on switch. The switch even works whilst the console is turned on, which is funny to watch on Streets of Rage/Bare Knuckle. If you change it there you change from 50Hz PAL to 60Hz NTSC-U to 60Hz NTSC-J which also changes the text language whilst its scrolling on the intro.
Later games did use specific region versions and the games could be optimised for PAL 50Hz (Sonic 3 for example).
0:23 reminds me of the gba version cause its like this!
April 5th 2020 Ah Memories
Never had a problem playing it in 50Hz. The PAL slowness was only noticeable in games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast.
I just realised that the Megadrive I used to have was a Japanese one, not a European one. I'm glad!
Could you show the difference in sport games like NHL 94?
I kinda want to try the slower speed for the reaction times. I wish there was a way to play at this specific speed through emulation
0:55 - In fact the majority of the world is PAL.
All I have to say is - Up, Down, Left, Right, A B C start at the Main intro screen
Or Up, C, Down, C, Left, C, Right C, Start
Good lord, how did you guys live with this?
StrongAnarchy it was a simpler time, it’s funny how we all thought this was normal. Years of compilation disks and emulators have ruined the original versions!
For people who watches the PAL playthough of Sonic 1, Just speed the video up to 1.15, It's the closest to the original speed of the other Sonic 1 versions.
Isn’t it possible to use a speedup cheat tho. Is that able to work?
I live in Spain, and back in the 8 and 16 bit era we didnt know shit about 50hz or pal or ntsc, we only enjoyed games as they were, it wasnt until the Dreamcast and internet days that i discovered the difference in Hzs, i remember having to play Dreamcast in 50hz because my old tv wasnt compatible with 60, when i obtained a new tv and played 60 was like a dream, and later years when i got a pc and played emulation of old systems i was blown away, when i saw the truth, we were playing inferior versions all the time.
Now i have a AV famicom, a modified master system with rgb and region and hz switches, a Super Nintendo ntsc usa with the plastic tabs removed, my mega drive all moded for region and hz....
Sonic 1 is the game i show to all my friends to see the differences in speed, they all have a modded consoles lol.
Yeah we didn't care back then. Nobody really knew about it. I suppose magazines might have mentioned it, but not official Sega magazines that's for sure. Sega was just incredibly lazy with sonic 1 and didn't bother optimising it for PAL regions, they just put literally the exact same game in the cartridge, the exact same code, so if course it was much slower. But for sonic 2 and CD and 3&K they optimised it for PAL regions, so it ran as fast as the NTSC versions, just with a slightly lower frame rate. But everything went by as fast, sonic ran as fast, the music was the correct speed, etc
But yeah it's kinda funny, sonic was a game that was heavily marketed around one thing, speed, and yet sonic 1 in PAL regions was literally slower than all the mario games that had come out at that point.
But it's the first game I ever played, Sonic 1, and I was only like 4 or 5 years old. So it was a good training game to break me in to the world of gaming, because by being so slow it's a lot easier. And sonic games were always very easy anyway, they're pretty much the easiest games of the 16 bit era. Mario on the other hand was always brutally difficult. I remember the first mario game I owned was SMB 3 for the game boy advance. And I never got anywhere in it. Because it's so so difficult if you're used to sonic. You only get at most 2 hits before you die, collecting coins doesn't refill your health like rings do, you can't jump into the side of enemies to kill them like with sonic but instead have to jump directly on the very top of the enemies so being precise with jumping is really hard, etc. The mario games were always insanely difficult. These days I can beat them pretty easily (except super Mario World 2, I always get lost in certain levels of that, cos its more of a puzzle platformer, so I have to look up walkthroughs). I also always thought the mario games were really boring in design. Because in sonic, every zone looks entirely different to all the rest. The artwork is just brilliant and so varied, with new enemies for each zone too. But in the mario games they just had like 1 to 3 different types of level and just repeated them ad nauseum. And maybe that makes sense with the NES ones (though it wasn't impossible to have different levels on the NES, just look at mega man) but yeah super Mario World on the SNES comes out, and it's only got 4 types of levels!? 4 levels, in the whole game. The outdoor one, the forest one, the castle one, and the ghost House one. There's no individuality to the levels at all. Meanwhile sonic 3&K has 14 zones that are 100% different from each other in art work. And even then, with 2 acts for each zone, for a lot of the levels, the 2nd act also looks completely different to the first, so really it's a lot more than that (like Angel Island Zone being turned from a lush green paradise to an enormous forest fire), it's more like 28 different types of levels, as opposed to SMW's 4 types.
But yeah back then I just thought the mario series was trash and sonic rules forever. These days my opinion has flipped. I prefer the mario games now just from a pure gameplay perspective. They never get boring, even if you replay them 100 times. The lack of any interesting or creative level art doesn't really matter to me anymore. And now I've had years of practice with them so I can beat them easily, I don't get super frustrated like I did when I was 12
NTSC: You're too slo-ow!
zH 09....
What The Is My Mega Drive Dying ....
If you only had the pal Mega Drive you wouldn't have known the difference surely. Unless someone you knew had the ntsc version how would you be able to compare?
I'm assuming he was using an emulator for a while then went back and set up his PAL Mega Drive and noticed the difference with the original Sonic.
Just got a modded Mega drive 2 with 50/60hz switch. I Wonder if I can get the pal version to run in 60 hz or do I need the NTSC version. My MGD2 can take both PAL and NTSC games.
7:32 I don't even knew we can destroy this boss ! ^^
For most games I fully understand the speed difference, but for Sonic in particular I've been a bit mistified about it ever since I read an article about how Sonic works. Basically Sonic does not move characters (or the screen) at one-pixel increments.
Instead it uses fixed-point math that allows a wide range of speeds, including fractional ones. This was pretty revolutionary back in the day (for a platformer anyway, 3D games already did this) and is one of the reasons Sonic accelerates in such a smooth curve.
The consequence of this all is that Sonic might move 3 1/4th pixel for a particular frame, or 8 1/24th, etc. Using such a system, it's actually possible to get both the PAL and NTSC version of the game to play at the same 'speed' merely by multiplying all these speed constants by 1.17.
You'd have a small issue with sampling the controls at 60Hz intervals instead of 50Hz and the game might be slightly less smooth in some places, but this can be done. Note that this would not fix all differences, merely movement speed related ones. Animation speed, music speed and timer speed would need to be fixed seperately.
Anyway, it's been a bit of a mystery to me as to why this wasn't done - the game already uses speeds that are fractions of pixels so the change would not have been as big as some might think.
Could you compare sportgames like NHL 94?
was there a difference in sonic 2 and 3 with 50 hz vs 60hz ? or was it the original sonic only
Go to my channel and check out my playlists. You'll see a Sonic 2, 3, CD and 3D videos of 50Hz Vs 60Hz :)
how do you make scanlines on lcd tv ? it looks so good
Labyrinth zone Robotnik fight is so difficult. I've only defeated him once and that was in 50Hz.
I have modified my mega drive to work in 60Hz and I've noticed that the image gets stretched vertically. (Your video confirmes this, if you look at the rings they are not perfectly round in 60Hz). It's really annoying.
it's the other way round: ntsc looks like the game is supposed to look and pal is squashed vertically
zetmoon You're both wrong, every classic sonic game has an internal ratio of 10:7 which is wider than the traditional 4:3 crt ratio, and more narrow than what was shown in the video.
I don't think anyone asked your opinion, Red XIII!
God Xenous isn't pal around 5:4?
Love Labyrinth Zone. Music is brill.
Sonic multi(if you dont know it it is basically a romhack where if u hit something except eggman, it duplicates) even in 60hz its sound is still like 50hz
Not gonna lie. I’m an American, and the gameplay/music in the PAL version is really trippy! I never knew that this was the difference. I knew about 50 vs 60 Hz because of other games, but none of them had this drastic of a difference.
i guess for a game so early in the consoles life, it's almost understandable that it wasn't optimized for 50hz like many games later were.
What Happens If You Get All 7 Chaos Emeralds In The iOS Version?
Sadly itd only in non save mode.
I just recently got all emeralds in this game without save states. I got them by Springyard act 2 in the 60 hrtz version.
I thought PAL games had more lines than the NTSC. 288 vs 240. For example Earthworm Jim fills my entire screen on the PAL version, while NTSC does not. Problem was optimization for PAL being poor rather the the 50hz vs 60hz.
I can emulate NTSC with my PC connected to my CRT, I wonder if I can play NTSC at high speed (it will still be 50hz)