[mmaniac]

As other commentors have pointed out, Japan uses NTSC. PAL is mostly a European thing.

As far as the SNES is concerned, PAL consoles simply letterbox the video and run the game 16.6% slower. Occasionally the game speed is modified to account for the decreased framerate. Super Metroid's engine was sped up so that gameplay was faster frame-by-frame and approximately as fast in wall clock time, but this introduced a number of bugs.

It wasn't until framebuffer based consoles like the Playstation where using the extra lines of PAL signal became common. Game speed was still a common issue until the Dreamcast and PS2 where game speed ceased to be an issue and optional 60Hz support was also common.

[singlePostAnon]

There's a few games on SNES of which the official PAL release draws an extra row of tiles on top/bottom, Super Mario World is one of these IIRC. Same goes for Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, and IIRC NES too.

It's not quite enough to fill the screen vertically on many PAL TVs (and especially not monitors which in general have less or no overscan at all), but even the PlayStation's and Saturn's (and PlayStation 2's!) PAL modes still have this problem, the framebuffer is just not big enough vertically.

Also the pixel aspect ratio is still distorted, because the 2D gfx assets haven't been redrawn. On later consoles, some (but not all) 3D titles do account for this, sometimes even the 2D assets (HUDs, menus, etc.) are drawn with a bit of vertical stretching, especially on PS2 where bilinear filtering is available.

Even on PS2 some games still have wrong timing in the official PAL release. Final Fantasy X comes to mind... music speed is correct, everything else runs slow (picture is vertically squished as well, Square just didn't care about doing proper PAL versions until later in the PS2 era).

This (and earlier and in general just better title availability) is why some people living in PAL countries always preferred to bypass the region locks (or just import NTSC hardware) and import NTSC releases.

I'm not sure if there are any console games by an European developer where the PAL version is actually the original or intended experience and better, but on old home computers (C64, Amiga, etc.) there definitely are.

[mmaniac]

Wipeout on the Playstation - by defunct developer Psygnosis in Liverpool, England - is well known for having good PAL versions.

[rightbyte]

> As far as the SNES is concerned, PAL consoles simply letterbox the video and run the game 16.6% slower.

Oh. That should make uncompensated PAL games easier, right? 17% more time to time e.g. jumps in Mario is alot.

[Sesse__]

For NES Tetris, playing on PAL is basically considered easy mode. Some of the top players have been doing it to train for difficult feats.

[mmaniac]

That's right. Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive is the goto example, where even the music runs slower.

[rightbyte]

Ye I got that one. Had this blue bar around the screen too. Even as a kid I noticed there was something off with the music and speed compared to Sonic 2 and which seemed to be a better port.

[singlePostAnon]

Yeah, but if you're timing a speedrun using a real world clock, then the PAL version may actually be harder because it runs slower.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are games out there with a visible in game timer which has been adjusted for PAL while the rest of the game is still slow as well...

edit: Oh yeah, I also just recalled that the PAL version of the PlayStation port of Doom was PAL fixed in a funny way:

The game timer still ticks at the same rate as in the NTSC version (so it's slightly too slow now in PAL), but the player's movement speed has been increased, so you can sometimes make jumps which just aren't possible on NTSC or the original PC version.

Durations for frames (states) of monsters and the player's weapons which are counted in game timer ticks have been adjusted inconsistently as well, which results in at least the shotgun being more powerful since it's faster relative to everything else in the gameworld.

I don't remember whether projectile speeds were adjusted. Monster projectiles now being slightly faster (relatively) would tip the scale a bit the other way.

So even a supposedly PAL fixed game be easier than the NTSC original, or it can just be different as well.

[leokennis]

It's not alot. But it is a lot.

/pedantic