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/vr/ - Retro Games

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765148 No.765148 [Reply] [Original]

After only recently hearing about how shitty PAL N64s are, I'm wondering are there any other consoles with regions to avoid?

>> No.765152

>>765148
Pre-PS2 pal consoles (and games) by Japanese manufacturers are to be avoided in general.

>> No.765201
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765201

>tfw I've living in a PAL region all my life and don't give a fuck about PAL or NTSC

>> No.765219

how are pal N64s shitty anyway?

>> No.765223

>>765219
>muh sixty hurrrtz

>> No.765249

An N64 of any region, really.

>> No.765260

Play PAL consoles like Commodore 64 GS, Amstrad GX4000 or Amiga CD32

>> No.765363

>>765219
No RGB out, shit s-video output that takes serious work to obtain, awful muddy composite.

50Hz and no feasible frequency mod is just the dogshit icing on the cake.

>> No.765398

>>765363
Considering that the PAL versions of N64 games by Rareware and Factor 5 are generally superior, the situation is rather complex. People tend to forget some games are arguably SUPPOSED to run at 50Hz.

>> No.765469

>>765398
They're sure not SUPPOSED to run with vastly inferior video output, though. Unless you're lucky enough to have a first release French machine you're fucked if you want anything better than s-video out.

Even Rare's stuff isn't universally PAL friendly. Just look at Blast Corps alongside the NTSC version. More stuff than previous gens tried to at least go fullscreen and fullspeed, but outside of UK stuff it's horribly hit and miss, especially on 1st party stuff. Nintendo honestly didn't give a fuck.

>> No.765486

the PAL NES and Megadrives are shitty too.

Well the main problem is that those consoles run at a slower speed and the games and BGM are slowed down, it really is a shame. Dunno if someone here has already tried to play Sonic 1 at 50Hz, it is unbearable. But well I live in Europe so i had to deal with it.

>> No.765495

>>765486
PAL megadrives are fine because they're so easy to mod to 60hz

>> No.765512

>>765398
that's kinda true, but most of the games released in the world were NTSC games. ( or supposed to run at 60Hz at least ). Of course there were some exceptions, but overall it was better to have a system that ran at 60Hz.

>> No.765508

>>765469
It goes beyond Nintendo not caring. When you get in to the realm of stripping cheap parts out just to 'region lock' cables you're in to sadism territory.

Same with the GC having no component support in Euroland without chipping, and needing 'active' RGB cables. They really did consider us second class citizens.

>> No.765518

>>765486
watching a comparison video, the game is probably not as fun, but I'm loving the slowed down music

>> No.765532

>>765495
I was lucky enough to live in an area with a fairly active import scene, so there was always the shady guy on the market stall willing to region and frequency mod the 16-bit machines.

Saturn and PSX were easily chipped for multiregion stuff and used 'normal' cables so the only issue there was getting your hands on NTSC games at a reasonable price if you weren't willing to pirate.

Out of the big machines it was only really the NES and N64 that posed a problem.

>> No.765531

>>765495
True. But you can't do that with an NES. Fortunatly most of the games created by Nintendo were optimized for the 50hz systems too, so they did not suffer from slowdowns, but third-party games were often too slow on PAL consoles.

>> No.765549

>>765469
As a rule of thumb, games from UK developers tend to be designed with PAL in mind. In Rareware's case, they tended to finish the NTSC version first, then spend a few weeks/months polishing up the PAL version. (Which is why all the debugging features were removed from PAL Goldeneye, for example.) PAL GE/PD run better than their NTSC counterparts.

Factor 5 might have been American, but they were originally from Germany, which explains why the PAL versions of their games run so well.

The fundamental problem is that Japanese/American developers tended to have little to no idea how to make a game run at 50Hz properly. They were/are familiar with the 60Hz NTSC standard. Back in the Amiga days, PAL games on systems like the Amiga sometimes got horrible NTSC ports which ran too fast.

However, the problem of image quality on PAL N64s due lack of quality output options is significant.

IIRC, the only existing rom of Eurocom's 40 Winks is a PAL dump.

>> No.765552

>>765152
Dreamcasts are a notable exception. You can mod those to allow the region and video mode to be set, or use a boot disc.

>> No.765564

With Ocarina of Time, Nintendo, being Japanese, used the mind-blowingly shitty technique of synching the game via framerate, and locking the framerate at 20fps. When the game was ported to PAL, the 1/3 of refresh rate timind was preserved, resulting in a game which ran at ~17fps.

Stuff like Perfect Dark is trickier. The game isn't locked - it's capped - at 60fps/50fps respectively. This means the adjusted framerate isn't hugely different between PAL/NTSC, AFAIK.

>> No.765615

>>765564
Synching the game to the refresh rate is far superior to variable framerate. Ideally it should be 60fps, but even 30fps (eg. Mario 64) is more tolerable than variable framerate. If the game is consistently low framerate you can learn to compensate for it.