Love the 'PAL' reference - just like how many in North America were pining for the PAL video standard (initially Europe but later entire world except North America) but we were stuck with NTSC (and doubled down).
There's a sad bit of irony that the year is 2024 and the game console in your pocket could feasibly run anything you want, but the OEM region-locked it again.
I initially thought of my RG35XX+ when I read "the game console in your pocket" and thought "no, it's not region locked". Then I realized this was a discussion about iPhones and yes, they are region locked now.
But, FWIW, I've been really happy with acmeplus's beta of Batocera Linux on my RG35XX+. My son and I have been taking turns playing through old gems like Pokemon and Aladdin on it, and I'm hoping to finally beat Final Fantasy VII one of these days.
Yeah, as a European retro game enthusiast I tend to avoid the PAL versions of anything older than the sixth gen of consoles like the plague.
By the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era most games were fine and PAL60 was becoming a thing anyway, but older than that and there’s a good chance the game just runs 17% slower due to the 50/60Hz difference, or has some weird letterboxing due to not accounting for 576 vs 480 lines.
Really? As someone who grew up with PAL, we were pining for your 60fps NTSC output, especially in fast games like beatem-ups etc (PAL is 50).
I still remember the first time I saw an imported Japanese PS1 playing Teken 2, and how much smoother it looked on NTSC. I could never look at my PAL copy the same way again, I couldn't unsee the NTSC version. For me personally, those extra 10 frames trump the extra 100 scanlines in PAL etc.
Honest question: is 25fps a net positive over 29.97 for 24fps content? No 3:2 pulldown judder/tearing, but speed/pitch are wrong. (Not to mention color differences, necessity of a tint knob, etc etc.) I don't recall having heard it discussed; wouldn't surprise me if some types of content are better on each system or it simply comes down to how relatively much the particular person is bothered by the downsides of each.
It was kind of a non-issue at the time, for the simple reason the DVD format used by all the players only supported PAL 25fps or NTSC 29.976 IIRC. There was very few "official" ways to get native 24fps content into the home until Blu-Ray, and by then many TVs offered a 24p mode to go with it. Neither PAL nor NTSC is ideal for 24fps content.
Yeah but what I was interested in was what people who came into contact with both considered superior. I'm gonna nip back across the pond tomorrow so should I watch my Betamax movie tonight or wait until after my Concorde lands? :)
PAL60 was a thing, but a lot of older TVs didn't support it. A bunch of playstation (ps2, mainly) games had button combos you held down on startup to enable it or, more rarely, a menu option to switch. I learned about it while playing burnout 4, and that it only worked on one of the house TVs.
A lot of PAL ports of games ran slower because they weren't re-timed correctly if at all. On the flipside, being the last major region to get games, there was often additional content by the time they got here. Like the infamous "European extreme" difficulty in MGS3.
Exactly. I remember that many PAL PS2 games at the time had big black bars at the top and the bottom, and as a result a distorted image overall. The video game experience was not great for PAL gamers at the time because most developers made bad PAL ports. Most gamers wanted undistorted images and 60fps, which was solved when we came to the PS3/360 era with digital output via HDMI and newer flat screen TVs.
Although, I'm sure US commercial TV stations frame drop movies to speed them up so they can insert more commercials these days anyway.
I can't say how it's done today, but at the TV station where I worked in the 1990's, we did. But we never dropped frames of content. That would cause all kinds of copyright and contract problems.
We did, however, drop frames of black and superblack. In an average hour, we were able to get back enough frames to insert an extra 15-second commercial at the top of the hour.
In a TV signal, the brightness is encoded using certain signal levels. So you'll have a set black point, and white point representing the darkest and brightest values to be displayed respectively.
If you send a signal outside those bands, it's known as a superblack/superwhite. The "blanking interval" (when the beam is meant to start at the top of the screen again) has a signal blacker than any black that would show up in a broadcast. If that were not the case, a black screen in a show would mess up your TVs tracking.