/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6421208
>can someone explain to me why exactly the consoles had to run at 50hz? something to do with the electricity that was standardized in europe back then right?
In the 1890s the biggest manufacturer of electrical goods in Europe was AEG and they picked 50hz for their products to operate at, their American affiliate General Electric also went with 50hz. By the 1920s most of Europe had adopted that frequency as the standard. However in America there was competition between GE and a company called Westinghouse Electric (which later became known as Viacom), they found that arc lamps (pic related) had a noticeable flicker at 50hz so adopted 60hz as their standard. Westinghouse products were more widely used than GE products so their frequency won out in America and was adopted as the standard for the country.

Japan is even stranger, they couldn't decide between the two and half the country uses 50hz and half uses 60hz and there are a series of massive power transformers running down the divide to change the frequency between the two grids (google 'Shin Shinano' for an example).

So basically, the reason electrical goods are region locked is an arbitrary choice made over 130 years ago and a product that barely has any uses in the modern day.