3VG’s RETRO GUIDE Part 2: PAL vs. NTSC, Video Modes

A few months ago, I wrote an article about the basics of getting involved in retro gaming and outlined the simplest way for a casual player to get some old games running on original hardware. However, that was merely the tip of this particular iceberg, and now we’re going to dive deeper and take a look at a subject that has been the reason for many a complaint and envious glance from European and Australian gamers towards our American and Japanese friends.

That’s right, today we’re going to talk about video standards and the differences between PAL and NTSC games, 50 and 60 Hz, all that fun stuff. We’ll also look at progressive and interlaced video modes, as those are relevant to the main topic in many ways.

When commercial electric power systems were being developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many different utility frequencies (also known as power line or mains frequencies) were used, and eventually certain parts of the world such as Europe and Australia settled on 50 Hz (with a voltage of 220-240 V) while others like America and parts of Asia used 60 Hz (100-127 V) instead. In the early days of TV technology, the screen’s refresh rate had to be tied to the utility frequency of the power supply to avoid interference, which meant running American sets at 60 Hz and European ones at 50 Hz.

So what’s the actual difference, then? Well, here’s the deal. PAL TVs running at 50 Hz can only display content at 25 or 50 frames (or interlaced fields, which we’ll get into in a bit) per second whereas NTSC sets are capable of 30 or 60 fps at 60 Hz, so the content will run visibly slower unless optimized for 50Hz.

The tradeoff is that the PAL (and the French SECAM, which has slight differences to PAL but nothing too dramatic) 50 Hz standard has improved color coding and higher resolution, being able to display content at 720×576, an improvement over the 60 Hz NTSC standard’s 640×480 (or roughly 848×480 in 16:9 widescreen mode).

Video game consoles have traditionally been developed with 60 Hz as the intended refresh rate, and this is where things get a little crummy for PAL users. With modern HDTVs and even the 50/60 Hz sets manufactured around the turn of the millennium, the refresh rates are no longer an issue and everything runs at 60 Hz nowadays.

However, we are talking about retro games here, and although it was entirely possible to optimize these old games for the PAL region and have them compare relatively well to their 60 Hz NTSC counterparts even though they’d still run at the lower PAL frame rate… well, the sad truth is that developers rarely bothered to do this while converting their games to the PAL standard.

In practice, PAL versions of far too many games until the the PS2 era ran approximately 17% slower than intended. Some particularly egregious offenders like Sonic the Hedgehog 1 even had slowed-down music (meanwhile, the original Super Mario Bros. had sped-up music because Nintendo apparently “optimized” the PAL release by just speeding up the entire game). Other games had massive black borders at the top and bottom of the screen which, since they were there because of the resolution difference, had the side effect of squishing the original 4:3 image vertically. This gives many PAL games that slightly squat look.

In the worst case scenario such as Squaresoft releases on the PS1 and PS2 and basically every 8-bit and 16-bit game ever, both of those telltale signs of a low-effort conversion were present and accounted for! The games were still playable despite the lazy PAL conversion, of course, and for most of us PAL users back then this was just a fact of life we had to deal with… on top of waiting several months or even years for the conversion, naturally, just to rub it in a bit more. That is, if the games even got PAL releases in the first place. RPGs in particular often stayed in Japan and America because nobody wanted to translate them into several European languages.

Oh, and then there were the games that got censored because Germany in particular has traditionally been kind of iffy on that whole video game violence thing. Germany was one of the largest markets in the PAL region, and publishers rarely bothered to release multiple PAL versions of their games which meant everyone would be stuck with the cut-down German releases. For example, we got Probotector instead of Contra since Germany wasn’t too keen on shooting human enemies. The UK had their issues with certain types of violent content, but also had problems with media depicting ninjas so the PAL releases of NES Ninja Gaiden and its sequels were called Shadow Warriors. Can’t forget the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, either.

You could theoretically import an NTSC console and games (and there definitely was a small niche market for import consoles and games at the time, as well as adapters and mods that would allow you to play games from multiple regions) and use those with a step-down voltage transformer, but 60 Hz support was still rather uncommon on European TV sets in those days. It wouldn’t really be until around 2001-2005 that most TVs would have support for both 50 and 60 Hz in the PAL region, and during that time you could also play certain games using a video mode known as PAL-60. This was a hybrid mode featuring the NTSC resolution and refresh rate along with PAL color, and it was kind of fantastic at the time.

Sadly, not every game supported PAL-60. Those that did generally had the option to switch between 50 and 60 Hz at bootup, although sometimes you had to hold down a button on the controller to access the option. The Xbox had PAL-60 as a system option instead, and games that didn’t support it were forced to run in 50 Hz mode. In this era, many games that could run at progressive resolutions (480p and up) on NTSC systems only supported the interlaced 480i/576i resolutions in the PAL region, as the developers usually removed the progressive scan toggle altogether from PAL games.

On the original Xbox, for instance, the progressive resolutions were still technically supported by the system and could be unlocked by modding or cheat devices, but the option to activate them was simply removed. I don’t know why this was done, but at least it’s easy to restore them. Meanwhile, on the GameCube, you can use homebrew software to force games to boot in progressive scan – if you have the cables to support it, that is. Frankly, 60 Hz is much more important than 480p, but it’d still have been nice to have progressive scan available in more games.

Hold on, what’s this “interlaced” and “progressive” stuff, you ask? It’s not that complicated once you get the basic idea, really, so let’s start off by explaining how interlaced video works. On CRT displays, the video signal consists of two rapidly flickering “fields” alternating between the odd and even lines of each frame. Modern HDTVs combine the interlaced fields into one frame in a process called deinterlacing, which may cause some additional lag but generally works quite well. In addition, a technique called field rendering was often used in video games to attain improved frame (or field) rates at the cost of image quality, especially in the PS2 era.

As John Linneman of Digital Foundry pointed out in his DF Retro episode on Ridge Racer V and during his guest spot in My Life in Gaming’s PlayStation 2 video, the infamous jaggies on PS2 games such as Ridge Racer V are in fact combing artifacts caused by low-quality field rendering, not a lack of anti-aliasing as is the common misconception. Some actual aliasing is of course present since the PS2 and other systems from that time rarely used proper AA, but the point is that the lack of AA was not always the main reason for the dreaded jaggies.

Progressive scan, on the other hand, draws every line of each frame in sequence, delivering a sharper, more solid and less flickery image. 480p and 576p are considered “enhanced definition” resolutions, and can be used on 6th generation (PS2 era) consoles via component video on an EDTV or HDTV. Of course, HD resolutions aside from 1080i are progressive as well.

When playing games from the PS2 era, you may also have noticed the widescreen modes in some of these games looking a bit strange, with small vertical borders to the left and right of the image. This is NOT to be confused with the borders in the proper 4:3 mode — in all online discussions I’ve seen about this topic, people get confused and end up talking past each other, which really doesn’t help those trying to figure out a solution. I was quite confused myself until I was pointed in the right direction by John Linneman on Twitter (thanks again, John). This mode is called anamorphic widescreen, and the idea is that the image is natively rendered at a narrower horizontal resolution to save on processing power (or, in the case of DVDs from that era, disc space).

The user is then meant to use the 16:9 option on their display to fill out the image to the proper dimensions, as it’ll look overly skinny otherwise. I’ve always just used Screen Fit mode for everything to get the original image without any stretching, but in this very specific case you do actually have to stretch the image to see it as it was meant to be displayed. The screenshots in this article and most others on this site were captured before I learned about all this, so the aspect ratio is a bit off and you get the pillarbox borders.

Finally, there is 240p, which was widely used on earlier consoles but mostly fell to the wayside from the Dreamcast and PS2 onward. To be exact, 240p is more of a video trick than an actual resolution. Instead of sending out two interlaced fields as is the norm for 480i, the console would only render a single field consisting of alternating lines and leave the rest of the lines blank. This is how the distinctive scanline effect with alternating bright and dark lines, beloved by NTSC region retro gamers in particular (in my experience, the effect is less noticeable on a higher-res PAL screen), came to be. Unfortunately, modern HDTVs treat 240p incorrectly and attempt to deinterlace it like they would any 480i signal, which results in some rather unpleasant artifacts and added input lag. That is if they even support the mode at all.

Right! That was a lot of technical jargon to slog through, but hopefully you got the gist of it because now we’re going to look at how this stuff relates to retro gaming in the year 2018. The focus in this part of the article is on the PAL and NTSC video standards as we’ll be spending plenty of time with interlaced and progressive video resolutions once we get to video upscalers in a future writeup, but I figured I would at least explain the differences between interlaced and progressive video in this part since I knew I’d have to talk about those video modes at some point.

If you are fine with doing your retro gaming on a PAL system even after the horror stories I recounted earlier, that is completely fine and, frankly, the easiest route by far if you’re a PAL gamer. You don’t have to worry about refresh rates, voltages, overseas shipping costs or anything like that, and you get to play all those old games just the way they were back then! If you are satisfied with 50 Hz gaming, then absolutely go with that.

Personally, though, I am very much a 60 Hz retro gamer, and most of my consoles are either NTSC systems or region modded to support both PAL and NTSC. As a general rule, I do not want to deal with the black borders and slowdown caused by low-effort PAL conversions because I got quite enough of that back in the bad old days. I want to play these games the way they were intended to be experienced, and that means 60 Hz.

I do make certain exceptions to this rule when it makes sense, though. For example, if I have to choose between paying 12 euros for a PAL copy of Silent Hill 2 or 50 bucks to import the American version (may or may not include customs fees), I am most definitely picking the PAL release. I may be a 60 Hz snob most of the time, but if the 50 Hz PAL version is that much cheaper, I don’t mind playing at 25 fps instead of 30.

So, how about all those power adapters, then? Obviously, you don’t want to burn down your house just because you wanted to play Shin Megami Tensei on the Super Famicom, not that those Japanese and American plugs would fit in a wall socket on this side of the planet anyway. Well, there are a few solutions, depending on the system and the sort of power adapter it uses. I’m assuming you’re in the PAL region for all of these, by the way, but the basic solutions generally work both ways.

In many cases, you can simply buy a PAL region power adapter designed for an NTSC console. I’ve bought several of these from a French online retailer called Retro Game Supply, and they have worked extremely well. Off the top of my head, I’m using RGS power supplies for my American SNES, AV Famicom + Famicom Disk System (it’s a single adapter), and Neo Geo AES.

Other systems use an external power supply that can be used with any region’s version of the console since everything’s in the cable itself. The Nintendo 64 is one of these systems, and I’ve been using the same power brick on my PAL and US N64 consoles with great results. According to my research, the GameCube also uses a universal power brick, but I haven’t needed to worry about that since I only have a PAL GameCube anyway.

Finally, there are the consoles using an internal power supply with a standard cord you see on many electronics, the one with the connector shaped like an 8 (or an 8 whose other half is rectangular). This cord doesn’t convert the voltage in any way, so NEVER CONNECT A GENERIC EUROPEAN POWER CABLE TO AN NTSC SYSTEM EVEN IF IT FITS IN THE SOCKET, YOU WILL WRECK YOUR CONSOLE AND POSSIBLY YOURSELF.

For these systems (original fat PlayStation, PS2, Saturn, Dreamcast, Xbox, 3DO, possibly others I don’t have on hand), you need a way to convert the voltage into something you can use, and in order to do that you need a step-down transformer. You can buy these hefty bricks at your local electronics store for about €25, and they’ll do the trick nicely. Just remember to connect them directly to the mains, extension cords might work but I wouldn’t risk it.

Naturally, you’re also going to need a TV that supports 60 Hz, or you won’t be playing a whole lot of 60 Hz games. Any modern HDTV with RGB-SCART and component inputs should work, although keep in mind these don’t handle 240p correctly if they support it at all. If you’re going to play a lot of 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit games on an HDTV, I would highly recommend the XRGB-mini Framemeister or the Open Source Scan Converter (the current preferred option for most retro game folks, although I personally have no experience with it) as an upscaling solution. If you’re in the NTSC region, connecting a 50 Hz system to a display that only supports 60 Hz can be troublesome, but if all else fails you can use the Framemeister or OSSC to convert the signal to something the screen can use.

If you’re shopping for CRTs, just about anything that says “50/60Hz” somewhere on the back should do the job and most likely has all the inputs you want, including S-video which is long gone from TVs by now. Brand-wise, a Sony Trinitron is probably what you’re looking for because they are some of the highest quality CRTs out there, although be warned that those weigh approximately a metric ton and may require a forklift or a team of Olympic weightlifters to transport.

You may want to avoid widescreen CRTs, because those big bastards are quite heavy as well and tend to have problems with screen geometry, but if you can find a decent (and/or free) one and have the means to move it… well, why the hell not.

There are also professional video CRT monitors (PVM/BVM) and many of them feature RGB and component support, although these screens require their own sets of cables and can be expensive and difficult to track down. In return, they offer the best picture quality you’re going to get from a CRT screen. Basically, if you manage to grab one of these things, I’m very jealous and you clearly don’t need my help because you know what you’re doing.

Anyways, that’s about it for this part of the 3VG retro gaming guide, and with this information you should be well on your way to building the most impressive retro game setup in your town. Next time we’ll… uh, to be honest, I have no idea what we’ll be looking at, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point.

I hope this article has been of some use to you, and if it hasn’t I hope it’s at least been an interesting or mildly amusing read. I would like to thank My Life in Gaming once more, because without their excellent RGB Masterclass series of videos this article would not exist, and John Linneman’s Digital Foundry Retro series deserves another shoutout as well. Thanks to these guys and their great efforts, my passion for retro gaming has grown stronger than ever.