I was having an arguement with some moron who thinks PAL (50hz) is far better than NTSC (60hz) in regards to the snes. he says the ntsc library isnt that much better and some other moronic stuff. I fought my case pretty well but i may be wrong in some of the things i said. http://www.reddit.com/r/snes/comments/22z8ht/i_am_looking_to_buy_a_snes_what_are_some_of_the/cgrzldn That's the link to the arguement. Any thoughts? Was he right? Was he wrong? Personal opinions regarding the PAL vs NTSC debates?
Super Mario RPG, Star Ocean, the entire library of games that weren't PAL optimized. If you can run PAL at 60hz you do have a better format than NTSC but back in the day this largely wasn't possible. These days we can do simple mods to get 60hz from a PAL console.
This is a persistent myth online--PAL color encoding itself is not superior to NTSC. IIRC PAL was developed to benefit European transmission infrastructures which at the time weren't as reliable. PAL was created for improved color stability over poor broadcast conditions, at the cost of reduced vertical color bandwidth (good for natural camera video, bad for video games). What PAL viewers are truly most benefiting from is not PAL itself but the System B/G standards (625 fields at 50 Hz) defining the frame timing. And each of those benefits comes with a tradeoff--all of B/G's extra lines comes at a price of field flicker, and the wider channel bandwidth means more crosstalk-free luminance data, but less channels across the spectrum. Anyways, the reddit argument: regardless of the broadcast system or color encoding SNES games are limited to a maximum of 240 lines, even in 625/50 mode which blanks the rest. There isn't any advantage to PAL SNES consoles in terms of picture quality. There is however a slight programming advantage for 625/50 games on older consoles like the SNES--50 Hz has a significantly longer vertical blanking period (since much of the screen is left unused) which means more data can be pushed to VRAM between frames for better special effects. In practice though this doesn't matter too much with the SNES since games commonly blank lines that often fall into NTSC overscan anyway (giving them extra artificial Vblank time), the SNES has DMA, and PAL SNES developers generally want to reuse as much code as possible for NTSC markets so few PAL developed games pushed the envelope (they are probably the handful of PAL-only releases).
As someone from the UK who has a PAL console, and has never played, nor owned a US console, I can say that ours looks better Other than that, I'd happily swap my PAL console for an NTSC one
I own a pal snes,super famicom and a snes and the picture quality is the same. If I had to choose I would take ntsc any day.
As well as the whole PAL optimization thing, many great games never came out in Europe, including Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, FFVI and Earthbound.
NTSC. As even being someone who has played PAL consoles all the time. I prefer NTSC for various reasons.
We in PAL land never got into JRPG's until FFVII came out, i had never even heard of final fantasy until then
I'm an italian, old pal user and can say that 50 hz suck. Recently I bought a super famicom and I can say is better than my pal modded snes in 60 hz mode, at least on my commodore 1084s monitor via rgb. the pal in 60 mod have an almost slight flickering visible in some colors like red, the super famicom has a rock solid picture. never tried us snes but think should be identical to super famicom being ntsc
I always played with RGB, excepted for NES, and I just laugh at all these chaps which played composite until recently. But, the debate could be between 60 and 50. Well, 60Hz games play faster, but at 50Hz, you can see that some games have less slowdowns (compare Magic Sword 60 and 50, and you'll see), and I would say go for 60 and have the programmers to learn how to code without slowdowns (which they did when they got the hang of the console).
