Posted July 04, 2013
Crosmando: Is this for real? PAL games are slower?
I now have the obsessive urge to find NTSC replacements for all my PS1 pal ISOs
For 90s consoles and earlier, yes. For the PS2/GameCube generation a lot of developers did a better job (but not Square, FFX was slow and squashed in its PAL version). I now have the obsessive urge to find NTSC replacements for all my PS1 pal ISOs
It stems from the fact that our TV system runs at 50Hz instead of 60Hz. The way they used to deal with this was by literally slowing the game down by that amount (sometimes it was done at the console level, they actually made the CPU run at a lower clock speed).
Proper conversions compensate by speeding the gameplay up by the amount the engine was slowed down (like DKC) but cheap conversions didn't compensate at all, so the game runs at 5/6 the speed.
There are videos on youtube demonstrating the differences for a few games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4gKOD4K088 (even the music is sluggish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7h9htbYDss (look how squashed everyone was D:)