If PAL was such a bad format, why did half the world use it as a standard?

>>11875950 (OP)
Simply had to be different from the US

Because that shit already existed and worked just fine before video games came along

>>11875950 (OP)
PAL was better for literally everything but video games.

>>11875965
>all movies and tv shows have to be sped up
trash format

It wasn't.
PAL is a much better color encoding scheme than NTSC.

The 625/50Hz thing has nothing to do with PAL itself. (e.g. Brazil's PAL-M is 525/60 just like the US) The b/w broadcasts before PAL existed already used 625/50Hz and both NTSC and PAL were designed to be backwards compatible with the respective b/w broadcast formats.

>>11875950 (OP)
because half the world is bad

>>11875991
Videophiles back then preferred PAL movies as being sped up to 25fps was seen as a lesser evil compared to the telecine method of using interlaced fields to make up for 60 not being divisible by 24.

>>11875950 (OP)
It's not a bad format, it's that the conversion from NTSC to PAL is difficult thereby bad PAL conversions.

>>11875965
PAL works better for video games if the game is designed for it from the ground up.

>>11875993
PAL-M is not proper PAL. Its some cursed hybrid abomination that uses the NTSC color subcarrier frequency. It does not have the same quality of real PAL with the 4.43 Mhz carrier.

>>11875950 (OP)
I like how even in screenshots NTSC runs faster than PAL

>>11876015
50Hz looks like crap on a color CRT (which all use the same phosphors). Way too much flicker to be enjoyable. PAL countries introduced frame-doubling 100Hz CRTs for this reason, but those are also unsuitable for video games because they cause ghost images trailing motion.

>>11875950 (OP)
It was a good format, but most console games were made in NTSC countries and most devs were too lazy to optymizm their games for 50hz.

we're way past this shit now but obviously the benefit of PAL was not having shit be interlaced, there was also very little difference in games that were properly ported
unfortunately a lot weren't, so now if I want to play ape escape with the good UK voice acting i have to deal with a sped up soundtrack or slightly slower gameplay

>>11876262
> most devs were too lazy to optymizm their games for 50hz
Its not a case of laziness, making a 60hz game function at 50hz is basically impossible. Attempting to do so results in a complete mess with various parts of the game running at various incorrect speeds, the physics also being somewhat messed up. The best way to "optimize" a game for 50Hz is to leave it alone, slow but correct is better than a mangled mess.

>>11876006
But 60 isn't divisible by 25 as well...

>>11876297
>but obviously the benefit of PAL was not having shit be interlaced
PAL is interlaced tho

>>11875950 (OP)
The world used it because they had 50hz power grids... It had nothing to do with anything else.
The US+Japan used NTSC because they had 60hz power grids.

>>11876387
Nope, Europe could have used NTSC at 50Hz if they wanted to instead of inventing a whole new method of encoding color television.

>>11876382
i thought that's why our crts didn't have the huge scanlines that you see on ntsc tvs but i guess i'm misremembering

>>11876416
NTSC TVs don't have viable scan lines either anon....
Photos of TVs are not representative of what tube TVs actually look like in person.

>>11876382
>PAL is interlaced tho
So is NTSC....

>>11876420
i definitely remember being able to see the mask on my parents' big trinitron and if i sat close enough to my small toshiba
which now that i think about it, both had 60hz capability anyway
idk i was always under the impression japs and yanks got huge fuckin black lines on their tvs the whole time lol, like obviously not visible from a distance but still something noticeable

>>11876436
Sure, you'll get that if you plant your face right on the screen if any tube display, including computer CRTs. But at any reasonable distance the diffusion of light when it hits the tube makes it completely unnoticeable.
If you're seeing it from a distance then something is wrong with the display (flyback is dying, tube is extremely worn making it dim, etc). But this is true for any display, regardless of PAL or NTSC.

I'm gonna let you in on a secret.

There is no difference between either.

Not then.

Not now.

Ah yes Mario good game innit had that nice steady music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYVOypbTrIk slow and soulful and gave you time to contemplate it unlike the boorish yank version

>>11876463
yo nigga das sum chopped n screwed sheet nahmean nahmsayin, dem whiteboys fx wih geetars n shihhhh dawg homie no cap fr, somethin like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkZc_gEmsZE sumn feels a bit 2 fast do yknawhmean uknahhimsayin nigguguuuuhhh?

>>11876463
There's a reason the NES wasn't very popular in Europe.

>>11875950 (OP)
>pal exists because video games
You're a retard.

>>11875950 (OP)
PAL itself is fine. It's superior to NTSC color (although only as a consequence of coming like ten years later when all the problems with NTSC color were known).

What you're referring to is the 50hz refresh rate which predates PAL and is unrelated to PAL itself. It has more to do with old TVs being designed around mains frequency.

Trial

>>11876371
i think the parent comment is about 24fps cinema and 3:2 pulldown vs 2:2 sped up 4% which happened with PAL

European TV shows looked alot better than their US counterparts.

>>11876705
>It has more to do with old TVs being designed around mains frequency.
yes, people were retarded back then.
here we have 50hz mains but adopted ntsc as the tv standard. proof that you can use 60hz tv's on a 50hz powerline.

>>11876397
Based knower.

https://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/marconi_1954_booklet_and_slides.pdf

>>11876859
It was done for a good reason. In the very early days of TV, electronics were shit. Synchronizing the TV broadcast with the mains reduced visible interference from power supply ripple. The TVs could actually function without mains sync, but some sets might have undesirable visual artifacts.

When color came TV broadcast was uncoupled from the mains. So for any country that got TV later mains frequency was never a consideration.

>>11876397
NTSC color encoding is shit, they were right to make something superior.

>>11876015
>if the game is designed for it from the ground up.
Cope argument. If they have to specially design it from the ground up to get it functional then that proves it's a shit format.

>>11876367
Rare, Core Design, Naughty Dog and Insomniac did optimize their games. You just need to multiply everything by 6/5. Sure It might be harder to do it properly on a system that can only do integers and you would need to debug a separate version, but even if it will not be perfect it it can be programmed close enough. Just look at Donkey Kong Country on PAL and NTSC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4x1BNuzjIU

>>11876924
>Rare, Core Design, Naughty Dog and Insomniac did optimize their games
Psygnosis too

>>11875950 (OP)
Arguably

>>11876787
Movie math is hard.

>>11876367
Back then devs often completely rewrote games from scratch when doing ports.
It's absolutely possible to do a decent PAL port, if the devs aren't lazy as fuck.

uck

>>11875950 (OP)
because much of the third world was under the colonial thumb of Europe until the 1960s, by which time the TV/electrical/radio standards had been set.
basically it just was a matter of who built the infrastructure. NTSC regions had their infrastructure built by the US, PAL by the French and British.

>>11877786
>double the budget of the game to get maybe 20% more sales
you forget that in the 80s and 90s, "PAL" in reality only meant the UK, France, and West Germany. everywhere else was too poor or sparsely populated to be anything other than statistically irrelevant for profit reports. and the population of the above three countries were significantly less likely to purchase video games, too, because of a mix of culture and living standards. so not only did you have to rewrite the entire game (including 3-5 separate languages), you were doing it for a much smaller audience. That's why the Japs never put much effort into game exports to PAL, and it's also why PAL developed its own healthy game dev scene.

>>11876387
Interestingly, parts of Japan are 50Hz

>>11876416
Some TVs will show prominent scanlines at the lower progressive scan resolutions that most /vr/ games use, and NTSC is lower resolution than PAL so that may explain the scanlines being more noticeable.

>>11876460
Of course there is

Would've been great if consoles had a 50-60Hz switch on them, because a lot of European CRT TVs could do 60Hz. On some really old TVs you can make 60Hz work by adjusting the vertical hold.

>>11878212
the dual mode TVs didn't come along until around Y2K, by that point the PS2 was out and they all were capable of both 50hz and 60hz. a PAL PS2 is the same as an NTSC one just with different DRM to prevent you from running NTSC discs. You can modchip it and play NTSC games on an NTSC TV just fine.

>>11878227
>the dual mode TVs didn't come along until around Y2K
I don't think so. I had a cheap 14" Philips TV from around 1991 which worked fine at 60Hz, except that the OSD didn't work though the buttons still did. I also had a 14" Trinitron from around 1996 could do 60Hz. Though my friend had a cheap 14" TV from the mid to late '90s which couldn't do 60Hz, I can't remember the brand.

>>11878227
50/60hz TVs and monitors were common since the early 90s. My shit tier sony TV from '92 has it, my commodore monitor from '89 has it. Only those kitchen soviet CRTs that didn't even have anything but RF usually didn't support 60hz but that's kind of a low hanging fruit.

>>11878227
There is an important difference between NTSC and PAL60. A lot of older TVs will sync to PAL60 without being explicitly designed as a dual-mode TV. It would be interesting to see a study done on this if someone has a lot of old TVs to see exactly what proportion of TVs from various eras will sync to 60hz, but its certainly significantly more than 0. Those generic TV controller ics that started becoming popular in the 80s were often generic components that support both 50 and 60hz.

>>11877840
Wow, Mario really ran in the NTSC version.

>>11878227
>>11878243
>>11878247
>>11878378
Another thing to note regarding this is that plenty of people were importing 60Hz NTSC consoles in the '90s and playing them on PAL TVs via RGB SCART. So a fair number of TVs back then must have supported 60Hz otherwise people wouldn't have imported NTSC consoles.

>>11878475
I don't think the inner circuitry even cares if its 50 or 60Hz, it just follows the sync signals in the input.

>>11875950 (OP)
Because home video games postdate the adoption of TV in most countries

PAL and SECAM are actually great for receiving over the air broadcasts, SECAM being extremely robust in fact

And a lot of the world is under the colonial heritage of the European colonial powers so they adopted what the former mother countries had as their television standards, since it's just easier to get TVs from the UK to watch in Hong Kong or whatever

>>11878475
>importing consoles
nigga whut? just put a mod chip in a PSX and it will play every region game you put in it, pirated or not

>>11875950 (OP)
NTSC was a new at the time which was not widely adopted as computers were not efficient enough to effectively use NT. As such PAL was used for a long time as the standard file format system which would later change as computer components advanced and dropped in prices enough for the average consumer to buy, NTSC was adopted as the standard file format system.

>>11876197
You're half right. PAL TVs designed for 50Hz used longer persistence phosphors to minimise the flickering. It was a problem later when you had TVs that supported 50 or 60, then the manufacturer had to make a judgement call, do you design it for 50 and have blurrier motion on 60? Or design it for 60 and have extra flicker? Going 100Hz was just another solution to the problem and had more to do with using digital de-interlacing than it had to do with phosphor flicker.

>>11876924
The integer thing was less of an issue than you'd expect. Games typically didn't have characters moving on whole integers every frame, it would play like shit. They all used some king of fixed point where there was a memory location for the hardware X,Y and a "subpixel" that would be inc/dec by another integer and when it rolled over the hardware X,Y was updated. Knowing that it makes all those lazy PAL conversions look even lazier when they couldn't even be fucked updating their already non-integer motion to use a slightly different non-integer.

>>11875950 (OP)
PAL isn't a format, it's a fucking STANDARD. and there was nothing bad about it. it was superior over NTSC. PAL had more lines and better colour support.

>>11876197
> let me just make up a bunch of lies
amazing

>>11876367
>Its not a case of laziness,
mostly. used to be common with japanese titles for their developers to do everything in ntsc and then do the minimal amount of work to get it functioning on pal systems (nes for example). those lazy incompetent japs didn't even bother fixing the music frequencies on nes games. the note tables for pal and ntsc nes audio are completely different. another example was c64. so many titles from america programmed solely for ntsc but they were fixed to work 100% on pal and ntsc machines. apparently you just have no fucking idea what you are talking about, just like the rest of the fucking idiots on this website that can't even be fucked using a search engine.

>>11878550
The world of consoles is bigger than the PS1, anon. Enthusiasts would be hitting up their local importer long before someone would figure out how to wire up a PIC chip to bypass a region lock. Converting a NES/SNES between PAL/NTSC is not a trivial task and the end result is not 100% correct either. The only consoles with easy mods were the SEGA consoles where SEGA used the same chipset in all regions with a trace or two to denote which mode to work in and rarely put region locks in the carts. So yes, people did in fact import consoles with enough regularity that there were a LOT of hole in the wall video game import shops that did plenty of business selling moonrune and american versions of games alongside the hardware to play them. And when modding became commonplace not only did they not fizzle out, they usually sold modding services, because believe it or not, they'd sell more import copies of games to owners of modded consoles than they would otherwise and this made solid business sense.
>>11878378
Basically any colour TV will make a good go at working at 60Hz because once we went colour there was no good reason to follow the power frequency and every reason to ignore it and try to sync to what you're being given. The most common problem though was that it may sync and display, but probably the geometry will be all wrong so if you can't access the manual controls for that then you will get a nasty image. But unless your TV had an NTSC decoder you wouldn't get colour, hence the preference among importers for RGB scart that would sidestep the issue entirely. I had a cheap 1990 TV that would manage to get a PAL60 signal off a dreamcast over RF. But it had tremendous coil whine when it did.

>>11878550
I think one reason people would import consoles back then is because consoles were released in different regions at different times, with Europe getting later releases. So if you were European you might have imported a Super Famicom in 1990 to play it well before the European release of the SNES in 1992.

>>11878552
What the hell are you talking about. NTSC came 9 years before PAL and they're not file formats.

>>11878508
No the TV must support 60Hz in some way, otherwise every PAL TV would work with 60Hz, which we know isn't the case.

>>11876924
>Rare (...) did optimize their games.

Late Rare maybe, but certainly not on NES. Yes I know they're European games, but Europe was not their main market.

Standards and such

>>11878552
Icwotudidthar

>>11878543
>Hong Kong

But mainland China was NTSC, right?

>>11878849
He's conflating NTSC and NTFS in a humorous manner being them similar sounding abbreviations

>>11875950 (OP)
Because PAL is better for videos
Games obviously suffer more

>>11875950 (OP)
>if communism is such a bad economic system, why did 20 million people die to it in the 20th century?

Because people are fucking stupid. What species did you think you were born as, again?

>>11880045
I'm of elfin kin, m'lady

>>11879834
>Games obviously suffer more
they don't suffer at all if they're programmed by pros instead of fucking amateurs. people have no idea just how low the bar was for games programmers over 30 years ago. fresh out of school and willing to work for nearly nothing? can you type "make" in a terminal and know the bare minimum of C or assembler? it's ok if you're parents still help you get dressed in the morning and drive you to work. meet the criteria? congratulations, you can be a game developer.

>>11879679
china is pal system d (625 lines/50hz, secam colour). hong kong, being a british territory, used the british pal standard.

>>11878508
>I don't think the inner circuitry even cares if its 50 or 60Hz, it just follows the sync signals in the input.
you can instantly tell that you've never encountered this problem at all. born into an age of where every digital tv is now pal/ntsc compatible. sure is fucking summer in here. the tvs care a fucking lot about what frequency it got. this started to change during the 1990s when a lot of tvs sold started supporting all kinds of standards so they could be sold internationally, cutting production costs dramatically in the process.

>>11875950 (OP)
Early televisions had timing that was similar to the local electrical grid of the countries they were used in.

>>11880218
> had timing
what the fuck do you mean had timing? its timing came from the mains frequency. it wasn't an arbitrary number pulled out of thin air or "similar" to mains frequency. it was exactly 50 or 60hz. exactly. to the fucking cycle. have you considered not smoking fentanyl?

>>11880218
It was a convention implemented by the broadcaster. The TV itself did not actually require the mains frequency to match. The reason why they synced up the broadcast to the mains frequency was to reduce interference because early electronics were shit. As electronics got better mains sync was no longer needed, and when the new color standards came out, they were no longer synced with the mains. But older TVs could still display the color broadcasts, because mains sync was not critical.

>>11876450
>at any reasonable distance the diffusion of light when it hits the tube makes it completely unnoticeable.
This is what I always thought - but I went to the retro-faire and stared at a bunch of 1042, 1701 and other monitors. Actually, even from far away the masks are clearly visible - you DO immediately stop noticing it, but it turns out that's nothing to do with it the mask being lost in the glare - it's 100% in your mind. Whenever you decide see it, you can see it - a bizarre pitch black crisp grid all across the image. Then as you notice again what's actually being shown on the screen, it disappears from your mind (not your eye).
But you and the previous anon are talking at cross purposes anyway, the grille pattern and the black gap between scanlines are two different things.

This thread is full of people who don't know what they're talking about but have no shame in sounding like experts anyway.

>>11879679
no
neither was hong kong
but dual mode TVs gained a lot of popularity after home video was introduced

Was there ANY non-PAL-region devleoped game which was better in PAL? Can't think of any
There is the one argument that the Star Light Zone theme was better in PAL. It's far slower than the NTSC which is the opposite to how you'd expect

>>11876920
You could reverse that gay argument for ntsc just as easily. If games are made for pal and have to be remade for ntsc then that proves it's a shit format and that's the only possible reason why!

Always wild to me people in these threads get so jumpy about PAL lol, it's to the point I think they can't be real people.

Look if you were growing up in a PAL country and watching a PAL console in action, you weren't questioning anything. Industry people might have been aware of the difference but the public buying the games didn't care. I don't know why some of you lose so much sleep over different electrical grids or whatever as if it affected you that deeply, it didn't, it still doesn't, you have the option to emulate whatever version of a game you want now, yet as it currently stands people on /vr/ are more interested in constantly handwringing about hypotheticals instead of playing games.

>>11880921
>Look if you were growing up in a PAL country and watching a PAL console in action, you weren't questioning anything. Industry people might have been aware of the difference but the public buying the games didn't care.

This isn't true. Magazines talked about it. Some games had poor conversions while others didn't, and it's not just the speed but also the black bars and the squished aspect ratio (for some reason nobody ever talks about that). If you didn't notice when playing Double Dragon 2 NES that half the screen was black but not when playing SMB3 or an European game then you're retarded; same thing when playing Final Fantasy VIII compared to Crash Bandicoot.

Not only that but you could also compare the same game on console and on PC. I'd always favour PC versions when I could because they felt so much better to play.

Also I like to think that Sega was more successful in Europe because they always cared more than the others about making good PAL ports (Sonic 1 is a bad example though).

>>11880982
Magazines are industry people, I guarantee you most kids (the target audience of games then) weren't going "öh nein dàs ǐß nøt zẽ œptïmal ęxpéríēncé".

Because everyone would like a PAL

>>11875950 (OP)
Because for television & movies, it was far superior. Far better and more stable colors (don't have to fuck with the tint knob to get it right), less or no dot crawl, and movies don't require ugly turd telecine conversions (instead they run 4% faster, but this is impossible to notice in practice). Also Teletext was awesome.
About the only thing NTSC TVs do better is allowing for Closed Captions. PAL supported that via teletext, but they didn't put those on home video formats, so until DVD it was impossible to watch captioned movies on home video.

>>11876416
>i thought that's why our crts didn't have the huge scanlines that you see on ntsc tvs but i guess i'm misremembering

No normal TVs have huge scanlines except the Trinitron panels that /vr/ masturbates over constantly.

>>11876489
>There's a reason the NES wasn't very popular in Europe.

Yeah, we had far higher penetration of 8-bit home computers, and Nintendo had horrible representation in many countries. By the 90s you also had Sega getting a large portion of the market, and then Sony getting near 100% domination (it didn't help that all the better SNES games remained NTSC only). The most popular Nintendo console in Europe was probably the Dendy & its clones. I still have one.

>>11878550
I remember ads for overseas consoles going as far back as the early 90s (Megadrives with purple hood instead of white). However those may have been the Hongkong models which were internally PAL. A guy I know also had a USA N64.

>>11880894
>Was there ANY non-PAL-region devleoped game which was better in PAL? Can't think of any

Dozens of Saturn games were PAL optimized and sometimes even had game fixes on account of being the last revision of the game to be released. There was one exception though, Outrun was optimized backwards so the game ran slow but the clock ran faster making the game impossibly hard.
Exhumed/Duke 3d/Quake were developed in america but had PAL support built-in, it ran in higher resolution and faster. Most other games were conversions, but with 3D games that was fairly easy.

>>11881125
Good to know, genuinely appreciate the info

>>11881001
>kids

Well yes obviously most pre-teens wouldn't know. But that's beside the point. Teens and young adults were always the ones pouring the most money into the industry, you can't reduct everything to kids.

>>11880909
Actually, you can't. NTSC is the official standard so games are prebuilt with it. PAL is that weird format no one cares about except loners who insist the speccy is a god tier handheld. Now... apologize. Punk.