disc wrote:Yes, they didnt take it into account in 99-100% of cases in the 1980s and 90s. Basically they just set the game to run at 50 Hz /576i instead of 60Hz/480i, which means borders of 48 lines on top and bottom of the picture is added, and the gameplay is 17.5% slower. So not only is it slow, but the aspect ratio is actually wrong, a box that is square in the NTSC version will look like a rectangle on a PAL system.
So. I was wondering.
About the PAL versions of games that have a 50Hz refresh rate. Why do people say that they run slower?
Do they actually mean that the developers didn't take into account the increased time for one frame?
That seems like a bizarre oversight. Did they really do this back in the Nintendo days? I cant remember having any problems with games back then.
A few Super Nintendo titles were optimized for PAL (like Rares games, because they were based in Europe and cared about this), but when N64 came along it was just as bad. The same problem is on Playstation and Playstation 2 games as well.
Now on Gamecube several of the games run at correct speed even in 50 Hz mode, same with Wii games, but you can still choose optional 60 Hz on some of them if you want a better framerate. Metroid Prime 2 on PAL gamecube ran in 60 Hz only, as did the Zelda Collector's disc (with Zelda 1, 2, Ocarina and Majora's Mask), but when they released them on Wii Virtual Console, the they were back in 50 Hz (the Ocarina was optimized for resolution).
Bottom line is - developer's didn't care before, now they do, almost every new title you buy to day will run at 60 Hz, but NoE didn't care for the Virtual Console. It's really mindboggling, because it would be so easy to fix (just a simple flag in the emulator would do it), but I guess they just don't care, or it is decided by suits who don't understand the issue. I work for a huge multinational corporation myself, I know how hard it is to get even the simplest little things fixed - if management don't think it's a significant issue (meaning something that makes the company lose money), you won't convince them to spend even a dime on fixing it.
