I have a pal version SNES. Does that mean I can play Australian and Europeans games?
>>2865638
>wanting to play games in an inferior refresh rate and resolution
Top kek mate. England an ice here, and I am glad I imported an ntsc monitor years ago. You never realize how shitty our 50hz and bordered resolutions suck until you play games how the japs meant them to be played.
>>2865676
lol you fucking moron you didn't need an NTSC monitor, most here can do 60hz if you're using RGB scart
>>2865638
If you have an ntsc SNES, you can play PAL games with a very small and easy mod to your SNES (requires just a pair of pliers, seriously)
>>2866879
It's that 50Hz refresh that ruins it. 50Hz flicker is intolerable, and flicker is the only way to get good motion quality at low latency from console games.
I'm just gonna use this SNES thread for requesting some SNES titles
I never had one as a kid, and didn't really get into emulation before yesterday, so I'd love some suggestions, preferrably action games
>>2866902
It's alright for European games.
>>2866908
yeah but a lot games like Mega Man X run slower
>>2866908
It's not. 50Hz flicker looks much worse than 60Hz flicker, and 60Hz flicker is bad enough.
>>2865638
>I have a microwave. Does that mean I can heat up leftovers.
if you want to.
>>2865676
The resolution is actually better though. Doesn't make up for the 50Hz, but still.
>>2867072
>Use SCART
SCART is independent of refresh rate. SCART works with both 50Hz and 60Hz.
>>2866942
Maybe if you're using a new tv. Most newer CRT tvs will give you an option between PAL 60, PAL 50, NTSC, and Secam. With the SNES you should be running the tv on PAL 50, this isn't usually the default.
>>2866942
You can call me a retard if you like but I've never noticed this 50Hz or 60Hz flicker you speak of.
>>2866879
ntsc faggots on suicide watch
>>2865676
There were games that were released in Australia and Europe that were never released in the US you dope.
>>2866879
Those theoretical max line resolutions never happened in practice and 50hz is fucking garbage.
>>2867152
You need a CRT, or a strobed LCD, or a high refresh rate LCD and black frame insertion.
Flicker is the only way to get non-blurred motion without adding latency and interpolation artifacts.
>>2867152
PAL land here. Never noticed either. What was wrong with my TV sets then, save for the refresh rate?
>>2865676
>imported an ntsc monitor
You daft bugger. Show me a PAL TV that can't do 60hz perfectly and I'll show you it's wood finish and knobs.
>bordered resolutions
the zoom button on your CRT TV remote exists to fix this. The aspect button on your HDTV remote can fix this. Only maximum foolishness results in one still seeing borders.
>>2868590
Most likely: you're underage and you only used sample-and-hold LCDs.
Also possible: baby duck syndrome, same as Americans thinking 3:2 pulldown is acceptable.
Jesus, you guys can't explain shit.
The reason PAL 50Hz sucks has almost nothing to do with 60Hz looking better (which is arguable considering the resolution superiority of 50Hz), it has everything to do with lots of games playing FASTER.
A lot of games NTSC play the exact same way on a PAL console except at 5/6th of the speed, because it's been directly converted from 60Hz to 50Hz. A lot of games, especially bigger ones, had speed hacks to speed the 50Hz ones up. However this could get very complicated, the games are already pushing the limits of the machines to begin with, so even among the biggest Nintendo games there are some such as Mario Kart 64 that run a lot slower on PAL. It's a real tragedy but that's the way it is.
>>2869082
That last part is a bit mixed. If the PAL version of a console isn't clocked slower as well, there is more headroom since it only needs to update 50 times a second instead of 60. It's the reason why the demo scene prefers PAL.
But yeah, PAL countries got screwed.
>>2869082
>However this could get very complicated, the games are already pushing the limits of the machines to begin with, so even among the biggest Nintendo games there are some such as Mario Kart 64 that run a lot slower on PAL
Wrong. The machine is clocked the same (or damn near close to the same), but it now only has to display 50 frames per second instead of 60, which means that the game code has 17.5% less stuff to do, and run that much faster or with less slowdown. (it's true that you also have more lines to draw, but this was negligible on most machines, something like 16 more lines)
There are some games which have little slowdown in NTSC on occasion, but much less or almost no slowdown in PAL versions. Demosceners also liked PAL machines better due to the extra cpu power, this is most prevalent for the C64 for example.
And most companies gave no shit about PAL optimization, or did it very badly. It was later in the 90s where they started putting some little effort into that.
This isn't the fault of the PAL system though, but the fault of every console game being made in NTSC lands. The other way around is also true, for example on the C64, where most active development was in Europe (plus the machine was faster), so the best C64 software tends to work worse or not at all on NTSC machines.
>>2869171
What I said was NOT wrong, it's entirely accurate, and you seem confused yourself.
PAL doesn't have "17.5% less to do", that's nonsense, and shows what you know because nothing is used to draw what's in memory to the screen like that, as it's done by DMA. According to you 100% of the CPU is used up drawing to the screen, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
>>2865638
US fag here.
Is a PAL SNES worth getting? Is there any important PAL-region stuff that didn't get released here? And how do I play these games? I don't think there are many TVs here in the US that are PAL-compatible (can handle 50Hz + the extra vertical resolution), unlike in Europe where most TVs can handle NTSC (60Hz) stuff (correct me if I'm wrong).
>>2869330
You could just modify it to run at 60hz, that's what I did with my Mega Drive. It's very easy to do. Your tv should be region free. My CRT tv can do PAL 50, PAL 60, NTSC, and SECAM. Just remember that PAL consoles require around 240v, so if you use an American power cord you won't be able to power the system. You'll need a step down converter.
>>2869231
>>2869171
You're both confusing the issue. PAL games tend to run slower because the game timing code is hard coded to move in 1/60th of a second intervals. In PAL land this same code will only move 50 increments in a second and so be significantly slower.
The fix is to change your increments to 1/50 based such that instead of the player moving 1.2 pixels per frame they now move 1.4. This preserves the motion rate despite the low frame rate. This requires no further processing effort however it can introduce bugs due to hacky assumptions that coders often make; assuming that things can only move X pixels between frames.
The reason very few companies did this was because that required getting the programmers back to change something that could potentially introduce bugs and thus require more QA. *OR* you could just let the game run slow, and release the thing. Much cheaper, less chance for screw ups and who gives a shit about them damn brits? Importing was rare, you couldn't hop on youtube and see comparison videos so while many people knew the "PAL is slower" meme they didn't actually have experience. So there wasn't a big pushback until the PS2 gen.
"Slower" is a confusing word because it means different things to different people. You say slower people think "less performance" when it's not the case.
>>2869407
>step down converter
if you want to go from 120 V to 240 V you need a step _UP_ converter. just saying.
but for consoles with external power supplies like the Mega Drive or the SNES you can just get a power brick that'll work in your country, it's the easiest and probably cheapest way.
>>2869330
Get a multi system TV. Import if you have to. I can't imagine life without one.
>>2869557
>PAL games tend to run slower because the game timing code is hard coded to move in 1/60th of a second intervals.
Yeah, and it's because the easiest thing to use for timing has been the vertical sync interrupt ever since the Atari 2600 days.
But that isn't what I was referring to. What I meant was that in 60hz, one frame is 16.67ms long, while in 50hz one frame is 20ms long. So everything in the system has 3.33 extra milliseconds to spend on crunching numbers or plotting pixels. Since game makers always push the limit of whatever they can do on the console, this difference in processing power is enough to give the machine more head room for edge cases that would otherwise cause frame drops.
And because of this, 50Hz games tend to drop the framerate far less often than 60Hz ones, regardless of the gameplay speed.
The bottom line is that many PAL games weren't optimized to keep the NTSC speed and are therefore inferrior. You could still use 50hz to display the same 'speed' and it was quite well known here in th UK.
