Dear "Great" Britain:

Be careful where you tread in here...
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Eviltaco64X
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Dear "Great" Britain:

Post by Eviltaco64X »

Do you prefer older games to be in PAL 50 Hz?
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Re: Dear "Great" Britain:

Post by Eviltaco64X »

bump out of legitimate curiosity
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Specially Cork
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Re: Dear "Great" Britain:

Post by Specially Cork »

No. It was total fucking shit - mainly due to lazy conversion. Of course, at the time I was a wee nipper so I didn't know any different, plus I never had chance to think about it because my mind was occupied dealing with the years of sexual abuse I went through at the hands of children's TV presenters.

Look at this comparison video.



As you can see, the PAL version is shitty. Really shitty. Even more shitty than the cocks of children's TV presenters after they'd finished buggering my tight arsehole while pressed up against the bathroom wall.

Here's another example of Final Fantasy X



Look how slow he runs. It's almost as slow as time seemed to move while I was kneeling down on the ground with my hands cuffed behind my back choking on some children's TV presenters nob rammed down my windpipe.

And the image was always squashed, like my little bald ballsack when I was a child tied up in some children's TV presenters sex dungeon.

So no, I didn't like it. But maybe I'm biased.
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Re: Dear "Great" Britain:

Post by Eviltaco64X »

I never would have thought PAL 50 Sonic's speedup music sounds like the normal music at 60.

Surprising to see it was still an issue in the PS2 era. I've heard a lot of PAL optimization and assumed that it became a standard into the later pre-HD generations (PS1/PS2 era)
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Re: Dear "Great" Britain:

Post by bogglez »

I think it's mostly an issue of bad ports.
Those old game engines were just tied to the frame rate instead of a proper timer, so the physics/animation/sound depends on the screen refresh rate, which is actually absolutely unnecessary.
The problem was not that things moved only 50 times per second instead of 60, but that 1 second of in-game time was now suddenly 1.2 seconds.
Having to output only 50 frames per second instead of 60 (at roughly the same resolution) saves a lot of cpu which is extremely useful on such old hardware.
Also the sprites weren't animated at 60 fps anyway. If a run animation has 4 frames per second, then on 60 fps systems each frame of the animation would be visible 66.6.. ms, on 50 fps it would be 80ms. Things wouldn't be slower at all, just less fluid. But because the screen updates more often than sprites are animated this wouldn't even be visible.
As is visible in the above calculation 50 also divides 1000 milliseconds cleanly, so it's nicer (=faster, more stable) to work with in integer math (floating point math was slow on retro hardware).

So this is not really about 50 fps vs 60 fps, but the bad decisions that were made back then to make game engines deal with both frame rates properly.
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