Question on "slow" NES games

[Southpaw]

Please forgive me for what is probably a dumb question, but I noticed some game reviews for NES (like Legend of Zelda) say "PAL Warning" and "will run slower than NTSC and with balck borders". Does this mean the game runs slower than it would on a regular old NES? What exactly does NTSC mean?

[Tennant]

NTSC is a region. North America and Japan. PAL is Europe and Australasia's equivelant. Any game released on the VC is a direct port of the version the game was released in, which means if it's released in an NTSC region, it'll run at 60Hz, whereas in PAL regions it runs at 50Hz and will have black borders, but this isn't true for all games. Hope that makes a little sense...

[neeher]

The actual problem is that those PAL games play slower than the NTSC counterpart. This is because of the crappy conversion they did back in the day from 60hz to 50hz. Instead of making frame-independent games, they just messed with the internal timer to display 50 frames per second instead of 60. So we get a game that runs and plays slower.

[Kevin]

What does NTSC stand for?

[Joxe]

Never The Same Color
Lol, nah, National Television System(s) Committee is the real one (according to wikipedia).

[Southpaw]

Thanks for the explanation!

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Joxe

Never The Same Color
Lol, nah, National Television System(s) Committee is the real one (according to wikipedia).

Very funny! Thanks for the input.

[kelvingreen]

Originally Posted by neeher

The actual problem is that those PAL games play slower than the NTSC counterpart. This is because of the crappy conversion they did back in the day from 60hz to 50hz. Instead of making frame-independent games, they just messed with the internal timer to display 50 frames per second instead of 60. So we get a game that runs and plays slower.

That's the explanation for the slowness. The bars, I believe, are there because a PAL signal has a better resolution; the solution is to either messily expand the NTSC image to fill the extra space, or "put in" black bars.

[iNma]

Yeah, PAL runs at a lower framerate but at a higher resolution. I'm sure Wikipedia will give an extended answer, but it boils down to Europe being treated as a less important region. Game code was imply not optimised to play on our TVs and games were therefore simply centred on the screen and displayed at their original vertical resolution, pumping out the same number of frames (translating to a 17.5% reduction in speed).

Of course, this also means that most games treated thus are proportionally incorrect - they're 'squashed'. Thank god for Rare games.