PAL vs NTSC

[danny197]

I’m from the UK and using PAL roms. I was just wandering does it make any difference performance wise whether I use PAL or NTSC. Its just I read somewhere that PAL roms run up to 17% slower than NTSC. Can anyone confirm this?

[Anonymous]

It doesn’t really need ‘confirming’, it’s just that PAL consoles ran slower than NTSC ones. Some games were ‘fixed’ for PAL, so there was no slowdown running on the slower hardware, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

The emulators will generally emulate this hardware difference since forcing alternate timings can cause no end of problems in some games (though you can force different behaviour in some emulators), but it’s just as handy to use NTSC rom images.

For most console games you will get a difference in speed across regions, though you’d really need to specify the emulator, game, game rom region and emulator region config used before I could really say specifically what you could expect to see.

[danny197]

So am I just better off downloading NTSC roms?

[richardpi]

Since I’m from Holland I simply have mostly EUR roms, without ever even thought about it actually..

When I exit a game after playing I can barely see a very quick message appear saying something with ntsc just before hopping back into ES. Guess it is the emulator telling me something about the PAL or NTSC indeed, but can’t really read it cause it goes to fast.

After reading this post I keep asking myself if I’m doing right playing EUR roms also..

[Mutex]

PAL uses only 50Hz refreshrate compared to 60Hz on NTSC Systems. If you are now using an NTSC game in an PAL system only 50 FRAMES of those 60 are displayed in 1 second. So the game will actually run slower. That also works the other way round. Using a PAL game on an NTSC system lets the game run faster than intended. Some Systems are able to adapt the framerate according to the system used (sms, genesis come to mind) but not all. If you want to use a PAL romset you should check if the used emulator supports switching between PAL/NTSC or maybe even has an autodetect feature. Additionally not all Monitors/TVs support PAL/NTSC.

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