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Lynk 21.03.2007#26

I tried this with Paper Mario US, and a PAL Killer7. The games swapped OK, and it looked like it was loading properly, but the screen just stayed black. How long should this take to start?

Add me on anything. I'm always looking for new friends/opponents/town visitors/chances to appear more popular than I actually am.

SmellyPants 09.04.2007#27

can someone tell me what PAL and NTSC stand for. Im kinda lost cuz i dont know what they mean.

Slydevil 09.04.2007#28

SmellyPants said:
can someone tell me what PAL and NTSC stand for. Im kinda lost cuz i dont know what they mean.

Pal & NTSC just means how the games are coded, NTSC is how discs are coded in North America and other regions, Pal is how they're coded in Australasia, Europe....It stops people from importing and getting games on the cheap. So you can't play North American games on a European console and vice versa...

IANC said:
Dude yuor totally awesome. And i won't be killing you anytime soon.

Martin_ 09.04.2007#29

SmellyPants said:
can someone tell me what PAL and NTSC stand for. Im kinda lost cuz i dont know what they mean.

They are different television formats. They stem from years ago when TV was in it's infancy and, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, it was decided that there needed to be a unified television standard. Unfortunately, different countries and regions created their own standards. Each standard has it's own attributes, pros and cons. I'm not an expert on the subject, but here's what I've read up on it:

There are two dominant formats, PAL and NTSC. NTSC stands for National Television Standards Committee, and was established in the US. PAL stands for Phase Alternate Line, and was established in Germany, and was adopted by most of Europe. The name 'PAL' is directly indicative of the way a PAL image is updated on the screen. It does it two lines at a time, from the top of the screen to the bottom, as opposed to NTSC, which updates all the lines at once. This is the reason why, when viewed next to an NTSC image, the PAL image can seem to 'flicker' slightly.

PAL has a significantly higher resolution than NTSC (20% more pixels). On a 4:3 image ('normal', non-widescreen TVs), an NTSC image will consist of 720 x 480 pixels (345,600 total on-screen pixels), whereas the PAL image will consist of 720 x 576 pixels (414,720 total on-screen pixels). This difference in resolution remains for all the aspect ratios, I just used 4:3 as a direct example.

Now, the difference isn't just in the resolution, but also the frame rates. PAL is some 17% slower than NTSC. Whereas NTSC peaks at 60fps (fps = frames per second), PAL peaks at 50fps. This wasn't generally an issue when TV was created, as all films are displayed at 24fps (actually 25fps in PAL regions, because of some long-ass reason I'm not going to explain), and television content is never more than 30fps.

Bear in mind that I'm glossing over vast amounts of stuff here, but I just wanted to give you the basics. A PAL60 format exists, which is just as fast as NTSC, there's interpolation and progressive-scan to consider (interpolation being every other line being updated, and prog scan being every line), but I'll end it there. Go Wikipedia or something if you're interested on learning more.

The common misconception in the gaming community is that PAL is inferior. On the contrary, PAL is superior. It has a significantly higher resolution, and therefore, picture clarity. Films are arguably always best watched on their PAL versions (purely talking about picture quality, let's not get into a debate about special features and scenes from one version/region not being present in another). Film directors, aficionados, and moguls generally prefer the PAL format over NTSC.

The problem has been with the upstart videogames industry. You see, videogame console manufacturers have (until recently), been pretty much exclusively Japanese, and the industry was certainly dominated from Japan, and revolved around it. In the early days, America was lucky to get an English translation and release of alot of games, and Europe was even luckier to receive a subsequent multi-lingual translation and release.

Games were generally made in Japan or sometimes the US, and even the few that were made in Europe and other non-NTSC regions were made in NTSC, as that was the television standard for the gaming industry's biggest regions (by far), and therefore, the places where the games were primarily going to sell. So PAL was very much a distant afterthought in this period, unfortunately.

When the industry was in these formative stages, no games underwent the necessary conversion to PAL in order to display at full-screen, full-speed. A PAL release generally meant the dreaded 'straight conversion'. A practice which which was never done, considered acceptable, or tolerated in other, bigger industries, was what we PAL gamers were cursed with.

What this entailed was basically operating completely in NTSC (same resolution, etc), but outputting the image in PAL. This results in the huge black 'widescreen' borders you find in PAL games (unfortunately it still happens now sometimes). The reason they exist is because the game is only operating in 720 x 480 (well actually, half of this back then), and the extra 96 lines of the 720 x 576 PAL image manifest as 'borders'.

The decrease in speed is because the extra lines, although blank and unused, are still processed. As PAL takes 17% longer to refresh it's screen than NTSC does, a game which has been straight 'converted' (I find the term 'conversion' unapplicable in these cases) retains this decrease in speed of the actual image.

Like I said, no other industry has ever done this, just gaming. Also, it's worth mentioning that another reason is that, unlike films, television, etc.. PAL optimization in a game requires extra computational time than the NTSC original. To optimize for PAL properly, one does not only have to address the difference in speed (in order to achieve the same speed, when all is said and done), you have to render 20% more pixels in order to achieve full-screen in PAL.

It's not a great huge deal, but when, for argument's sake, your development team has already squeezed 110% out of the PSone (or whatever), with a game that pushes the machine to it's very limits and beyond, it can be a big ask to get them to then do a proper PAL conversion, with a 20% higher resolution, sorting out the speed, etc.

96 lines may seem rather trivial now, but back when games consoles were not much more powerful than pocket calculators, it could often be totally beyond the capabilities of the game engine to render a 20% higher resolution and maintain an acceptable frame rate, let alone an equal one.

To my knowledge, PAL optimization in video games started in the fifth generation. Initially, it was with games' speed being corrected for PAL. They would be sped up, so that when put through PAL, they appeared at the correct speed. So the resultant game would not suffer from a decreased speed, but would still contain borders. This was a very welcome step, but it wasn't perfect, and only a few devs ever did this anyway. The 'straight conversion' was still by far the preferred method.

Then a ray of light came. Rare released Blast Corpse on the N64. Not only was the game's speed corrected for PAL, but the borders, while still present, were much diminished. It was the start of something great. For the first time (to my knowledge) a developer put their foot down, and said "No". Rare were the first to put that extra development time into not only correcting the speed for PAL, but getting that higher resolution out of their game engine.

Then they released GoldenEye. By this time, they had more-or-less perfected the procedure. GoldenEye was not only full-speed, but full-screen! Rare stuck to this standard, and from GoldenEye onwards, there was no significant difference between the PAL and NTSC versions of their games. Other developers were slow to get their act together accordingly, but Rare set the standard of how a real PAL conversion could, and should be done.

The only time when there was still any difference after a proper, full PAL-optimization was when the game was originally running at 60fps, of which native PAL is incapable of. In these situations, we just had to settle for 50fps, which is still silky smooth, and your eyes (well, my eyes at least Smilie !) are barely able to perceive the difference between 50/60fps, anyway. What was noticeable though, was the appreciable increase in resolution and clarity.

However, up to (and including) the fifth generation, most 3D games ran at (or around) 30fps, anyway. Even most of sixth generation games are 30fps. 2D games' framerates are a bit more difficult to explain (so I won't bother to properly do so), but essentially, though a lot of them were running at 60fps, the animation of the sprites etc was not even a fraction of that, so the decrease from 60fps to 50fps wouldn't have been appreciable at all in a full PAL optimized game.

It didn't make an overnight difference to how the industry treated PAL gamers, as other companies were very slow to change their ways in accordance with what Rare were doing. Some have only righted their wrongs fairly recently (Square, notorious for shit PAL conversions, have only started doing it right in the last couple of years, shockingly!). However, it got the ball rolling. Slowly but surely, they all came round to the idea.

Then came the best thing to happen to PAL gaming; The Dreamcast. The PAL Dreamcast featured a 60Hz mode, and any game which supported it (which was most of them), ran identically to it's NTSC counterpart. This wouldn't have seemed like such an amazing breakthrough for us if companies had just treated us right and optimized our games properly in the first place, but none-the-less, it was amazing Smilie

From this day on, we've been putting the horrid days of 'straight-conversion' further and further behind us. Sega set the precedent. They put pressure on software developers to implement PAL60 modes for their games, and most of them did. And they all (to my knowledge) had proper PAL optimization regardless. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft followed suit.

Interestingly, Sony's implementation on the PS2 was actual NTSC, and not PAL60, and they also didn't put any pressure on developers to use it, resulting in hardly any PAL PS2 games which do. Shockingly though, an alarming amount of PS2 games, for major companies no-less, were still suffering the dreaded 'straight-conversion'. For example; If you'd like to play a game from recent times nicely ruined by 'straight-conversion' from NTSC to PAL, may I suggest Final Fantasy X.. Smilie

Anyway, we don't generally have to worry about this stuff with new releases anymore. When viewing in PAL, the most you'll suffer is a game being reduced from 60fps to 50fps (which is barely noticeable), but on the flip-side, it'll also have a higher resolution. And most of the time (except on PS2), there's a 60Hz mode there, anyway.

Still, we're left with the best part of gaming history being significantly marred in their PAL iterations. It's a crying shame. Sometimes it's bearable, but it's often pretty ruinous. Particularly with games that are centered around timing feel completely botched in 'straight converted' PAL (fighting games which are straight 'converted' to PAL are dead to me..).

So in conclusion/summery, PAL is generally better as a format, all considered, but in the field of computer gaming it initially proved to be problematic for the half-arsed conversions developers/publishers were only interested in doing.

Well, hope that was helpful/interesting. Note that I'm not an expert, and any area I wasn't sure about, I tried to remember to say "to my knowledge", or something similar. Have a nice sunny day, everyone Smilie

( Edited on 09.04.2007 15:08 by Oni )

Edit this post:

[quote][b]SmellyPants said:[/b]<br/>can someone tell me what PAL and NTSC stand for. Im kinda lost cuz i dont know what they mean.[/quote]

They are different television formats. They stem from years ago when TV was in it's infancy and, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, it was decided that there needed to be a unified television standard. Unfortunately, different countries and regions created their own standards. Each standard has it's own attributes, pros and cons. I'm not an expert on the subject, but here's what I've read up on it:

There are two dominant formats, PAL and NTSC. NTSC stands for [b]N[/b]ational [b]T[/b]elevision [b]S[/b]tandards [b]C[/b]ommittee, and was established in the US. PAL stands for [b]P[/b]hase [b]A[/b]lternate [b]L[/b]ine, and was established in Germany, and was adopted by most of Europe. The name 'PAL' is directly indicative of the way a PAL image is updated on the screen. It does it two lines at a time, from the top of the screen to the bottom, as opposed to NTSC, which updates all the lines at once. This is the reason why, when viewed next to an NTSC image, the PAL image can seem to 'flicker' slightly.

PAL has a significantly higher resolution than NTSC (20% more pixels). On a 4:3 image ('normal', non-widescreen TVs), an NTSC image will consist of 720 x 480 pixels (345,600 total on-screen pixels), whereas the PAL image will consist of 720 x 576 pixels (414,720 total on-screen pixels). This difference in resolution remains for all the aspect ratios, I just used 4:3 as a direct example.

Now, the difference isn't just in the resolution, but also the frame rates. PAL is some 17% slower than NTSC. Whereas NTSC peaks at 60fps (fps = frames per second), PAL peaks at 50fps. This wasn't generally an issue when TV was created, as all films are displayed at 24fps (actually 25fps in PAL regions, because of some long-ass reason I'm not going to explain), and television content is never more than 30fps.

Bear in mind that I'm glossing over vast amounts of stuff here, but I just wanted to give you the basics. A PAL60 format exists, which is just as fast as NTSC, there's interpolation and progressive-scan to consider (interpolation being every other line being updated, and prog scan being every line), but I'll end it there. Go Wikipedia or something if you're interested on learning more.

The common misconception in the gaming community is that PAL is inferior. On the contrary, PAL is [i]superior[/i]. It has a significantly higher resolution, and therefore, picture clarity. Films are arguably always best watched on their PAL versions (purely talking about picture quality, let's not get into a debate about special features and scenes from one version/region not being present in another). Film directors, aficionados, and moguls generally prefer the PAL format over NTSC.