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From: lukemorse1
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  • The Mario games I think were all edited somewhat for PAL. SMB has Fast music, Mario can run as fast as the NTSC version or maybe faster but his jumping is slow and the SFX also sound slow. SMB2 has normal music most parts but some are slightly slower, SFX are slower, and the jumping is slower but running is normal. SMB3 has Slightly fast and slightly slower music at different parts but some SFX are low pitch and or slow. Mario's Actions are slow but his running is normal.

  • PAL games are a friggin pain because of this shit

    So many games aren't modified for 50hz speed, so they'll run slower than they should on actual PAL hardware because game companies didn't give a crap about Europe

    And Europe had to put up with this crap up until the PS2, believe it or not!

  • @Doom2Guy

    Final Fantasy X :3c

  • @CollisionCat Well, up until halfway-through the PS2 then :P

  • Do more videos on this, the speedrunning community needs to knoiw which games go faster and which who goes slower.

  • This happens because some PAL games are optimized for 50Hz, which is about 17% slower than 60Hz. Batman and Star Wars most likely exactly the same as the US versions. Mario and Ninja Gaiden have their music set to +17% speed so they would sound correctly on a PAL system. The gameplay speed should be the same though.

    Battletoads is an European made game so both it's gameplay and sound is optimized for 50Hz and when you run it in 60Hz it runs too fast and it fucks up all kinds of things :)

  • Man, if I played the PAL Battletoads, I would probably FINALLY be able to beat that jet-bike race stage that I could never pass. I could finally tell what was going on. But I'd probably lose my patience at the slow motion eventually.

  • Battletoads is an anomaly it most likely taxes the system too much forcing the slowdown.

  • I didn't realize the FC version was released in 88 generally when the brought the game over the US they wouldn't change the original JP release date presented in the game. Zelda, Mario, Megaman all show the JP release dates not the year they were brought overseas.

  • Shadow Warriors plays a little faster because the game is meant to run at 25 fps and is being forced to run at 30fps because that was the NTSC playback rate.

  • they must really have been lazy when they they optimized the games to pal. The speed on pal nes could have been as the speed on an ntsc nes if they only had optimized the games correctly. Sure the pal nes has an little bit slower cpu but it doesn't matter if good optimizations are made.

  • im from 80s,90s pal console days. Now revisting them (rebuying) How can i get a pal cart to not crop and go full frame.Because emulators on wii/xbox with a PAL ROMS fixers all this up. Would a video encoder Mod fix this or should I just buy the PAL to NTSC adaptor and buy only NTSC carts for ntsc 60hz full frame image. Simply i want the actual console experience.Is there even one pal game from nes/snes that's pal optimized correctly.

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  • I tried playing Probotector 2 and the PAL Version of Snake's Revenge on an NTSC NES, and the music was extremely fast and it sucked

  • Blast processing For Nintendo!

  • my god when you were laugh/coughing during super mario bros you sounded like you were gonna fucking die

  • Trade Games!? :3

    I have a NTSC version of Battletoads! (I have sent you a message as well, check your inbox)

  • When I played Super Mario Bros in my emulator it did the same thing that it did in your video.

  • You should see PAL Mario bros on a PAL nes

  • I theorized something like this with my buddy the other day when he was asking if PAL tv's display a better, worse, or equal picture due to thier frame rate. So lukemorse1 my friend, please answer me this... Why mod you NES for PAL games?

  • I would like to buy battletoads from you :) (Of course the PAL version)

  • epic ninja gaiden music

  • Ok, HUGE question. I have 2 PAL B games. Both are in excellent condition, both have a copyright release of 1994. One is The Smurfs, and the other is Aladdin. Smurfs will work on my NES top loader, but Aladdin won't start gameplay. The title appears, but locks up as soon as I press start, HELP!!!! I want to play this game SOO badly!

  • it would be convienient if there exist a list of speeded up pal games so i can gather those and not having to get the ntcs version just to have the correct music speed.

  • Playing NTSC games on a Pal NES slows it down very much. :(

  • Looking at PAL and NTSC descriptions and considering how most games were timed according to the signal format should clear up the differences. The pitch differences are due to the processor and sound engine running at different clock rates in the PAL and NTSC systems.

  • You should order some PAL B NES games and try them. I have like 4 PAL B NES games (3 of which are Disney games), and none of them will play on my NES. My original model NES lockout chip has even been disabled and it STILL won't play them. My top loader won't either. My PAL B Smurfs game (Les Schtroumpfs) will play, but the stage intro screens are glitchy and near the end of the game the entire screen becomes scrambled. I've been searching for something that will alow PAL B games to play.

  • NEED HELP with this one: I live in europe and therefor i use the NES 220v AC9v power supply. But recently i bought an NTSC NES and i was worried if the european power supply is too much for the console to handle. It works perfectly with the 220v adapter but, here is my question:

    Will it damage the console if it's turned on constantly , over the longer period of time, like for hours?

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  • I think the reason PAL battletoads runs so badly on NTSC NES is maybe because it was developed by RARE, who were based in the UK. I think RARE always optimised the PAL games for the PAL NES. Whereas most other PAL games were just unoptimised (which actually sucked for us PAL gamers because it meant the game was slower than NTSC and with bad aspect ratio and black bars top and bottom). Most other 'unoptimised' PAL games would probably run without any problems on an NTSC NES

  • is the sound the only problem

  • dunno if someone already said it.... but the answer is really simple.

    NTSC runs in 60hz, while PAL goes 50..

    that made the sound effects aswell as the gameplay on the pal machines be really slow so they cranked up the audio speed to make it sound like it does on ntsc...

    And when you pop it in your NTSC machine it gets even faster cous now the speed is "normal"

    They only did this on some games tho...

    The other effects i have no explanation for :D

  • @Sniffzoer the game is graphicly speed up to you know. and the sound is adapted for pal 50 speed now if you put a slowed down pal 50 game in to and "normal" nes of course you will be noticing artifacts and sound problems

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  • battletoads!

  • I WAS REALLY STOKED!!! :D thats a cool word i never use that 1 :D

  • did you remove the 10nes chip? look at other vids if you didnt

  • SHOOT THE DOG!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Mario Bros= 70 FPS!

  • @nonobaOMGWEEGEE2 More like 72. But it's 60.

  • Ducktales the Moon Pal on an NTSC NES Sounds even better cuz it don't sound overclocked.

  • my super mario bros cart music is faster than NTSC

  • I suppose it makes sense that the games' music is faster on an NTSC machine. The music would have been a bit slow normally so they were probably sped up to compensate for the slower overall speed when playing on a PAL machine. However some developers didn't bother. Thats why Sonic 1 on a PAL Megadrive has slower music but luckily Sonic 2 onwards all had tweaked music.

  • Wow I really stuffed that double post up. Sorry about that. The first post starts with "Basically" and the secone starts with "Better" so read them in that order :P

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  • Better developers actually optimised the game for 50hz so it was still the same speed with less frames. So when they are run in 60hz (10 frames a second faster) they seem speeded up. So in fact the games that work for you are the games that were lazily ported to PAL.

  • yyo the pal one was originally fast so hence the fast music

  • I have similar problems playing NTSC games on my PAL Atari 7800. Some don't work at all, and others play at super speed. The Sega Master System handled this differently - it would naturally be able to run games from Europe or the US, but the speed the game would run at (regardless of region) was determined by which region system it was in.

  • Most of the NTSC games run on PAL nes but music and gameplay are a bit slower.

  • what about ntsc games on pal nes?

  • 健康なルークそれは友達のゲームを正しくする50メガヘルツから­60メガヘルツに転換するべき選択を有するために任天堂を変更し­なければならないだろうことにようである!

  • Retro gaming is full of frustration in the PAL regions, or at least with systems that connect to your TV

    Handheld games and computers such as the Commondore 64 and Amiga all work fine as far as I know

  • On some PAL games such as Punch Out and Kid Icurus that I've downloaded onto my brother's Wii, the music is actually a semitone lower than the US/NTSC versions, this is not an issue with the Wii, a friend of mine who owns a NES has recently commented on it to. Quite strange that in your case the PAL music is faster.

  • That music sounds crazy. Great video!

  • I have a top loader nes so I don't have to mod.

  • but the problem is that the top loader NES isent so valuable.....the front loader is...

  • I see a lot of front loaders in my area so its valuable here.

  • well in ebay, you can find a top loader for 20 or 30 bucks, but the front loader for 50 or 80, cuz the front loader is the more nostalgic...the top loader was released on '92 while the front was on '85.

  • yes but the top loader was only made for one year, so they made less of them. And mine was around 80$

  • i'm pretty sure the top loader is more expensive than the original one, as it's far more unusual.

  • pal sound is as fast as ntsc and video is slower than ntsc. If you play it on a ntsc nes the video will go ntsc speed (normal speed) and sound will go too fast. If it irritates you, buy a pal nes OR get a converter that you pop in your nes.

  • there ain't such a converter that make pal games run in pal speed on an ntsc machine.

  • lol that'd be the only way i could beat battle toads

    -hero

  • I'm making some NTSC to PAL videos of NES games. 4 videos are up. Check out the playlist on my channel. You may be interested. :)

  • i've had stuff like this happen with my famicom's NES converter some PAL games end up going like they are on acid lol

  • some ntsc games that get converted have slower speed on pal games however pal made games will run faster on ntsc systems

  • wow great video, that is messed up. if a PAL game is running too fast on a US system, that should mean it plays on a PAL system fine, But some games aren't PAL optimised e.g. Megaman in Europe plays slowly, so should play at the right speed on a US sytem. SMB on the other hand its faster on PAL anyway. Anyone know why?

  • OK, I do not know exactly what you mean, but thank you!

  • The Pal version of Shadow warriors does play the music like it runs in the NTSC version however when you use a Pal game in a modded NTSC console it will simply speed-up the game.

  • How do you play PAL nesgames on an ntsc nes?

  • You'll need to modify an nes by cutting of the fourth leg in the lock-out chip.

  • These days the frequencies aren't a problem anymore, so regional locking is purely from a marketing point of view (to stop importing, don't ask me why...).

    Back in those days, some games were actually modified from 60hz to 50hz. Playing those games on 60hz again is the same as overclocking the 60hz games to 72hz (120% play speed).

    Other games WEREN'T modified, and ran slower than they should on a PAL NES. If you play those on a 60hz NES, they'd play normally again.

  • You seem to know a lot about it and I need to know if Battletoads for NES is one of the games that was modified and thus at the same speed in PAL format on a PAL NES, as an NTSC version on an NTSC NES (u know what i mean)

  • what tv is that? crt? plasma? lcd?

    I want to know what model too

  • My NES is PAL and I think it is modded to work with other regions not 100% sure.

  • That's really weird. Very interesting though.

  • Nothing bad happens it's just that the game is programmed to refresh the screen with data and game logic at 50hz so if you run it at 60hz it will refresh faster than normal.

    Not over and underclocking...lol

  • that was marios crystal meth days, a dark time for the guy

  • i wonder how ntsc games play on a pal nes?

  • they play fine, my NES is modded like lukes to play NTSC games, and they play fine, no problems...even on 60hz....

  • You should get a Pal Nes, i never go near any modded or chipped consoles, but cool results though

  • Well hey, you got the easy version of Battletoads now, and be the first person in history to actually be able to complete the game. :D

  • u can get a Generation Nex console it can play famicom games and pal / ntsc. jest goggle it I have one and it kicks ass

  • Hey Luke i've had the same problem i got my nes from the US and i had some pal games around and the same stuff happened but keep up the great work.

  • that top loader is a famicom i have one of those but they call it the nes 2 what is up with that???

    those it play both kinds of games?

  • hardcore.

  • LOL luke you need a nes 2 to play pal nes games correctly.

  • well it is now possible to beat the bike stages

  • Dude, you made spit out my drink all over my desk. I think this is the best youtube comment I've ever seen. LMAO.

  • Luke, just get a PAL TV, I'm sure there's plenty of room in there for it. ;)

  • In the NTSC version of Return of the Joker on a PAL NES you can't get pass one stage, don't remember which one. And I think same thing will happen for PAL on NTSC machine.

  • good info luke, thanks

  • Your gonna need a special monitor for a pal system to display on an ntsc. Otherwise if you plug a pal console into an ntsc tv, you will see nothing but rolling bars.

  • that might have been the case back in the days when the consoles originally were released. Most TVs manufactured in the last 10 years or so should have no problem with both formats.

  • Batman and starwars arenn't "pal optimized" its plays at full speed on an ntcs machine, but it would be slow on a pal machine. Devil world is the same way.

  • Exactly what I was trying to say, just better articulated :-)

  • It plays faster on the NTSC system because the software house sped up the game itself to compensate for the difference in speed between PAL and NTSC systems. If it was stock code, it'd run exactly the same. Does that make sense?

  • the music is faster beacuse of the fact theat the pal nes had a lowe clock rate

  • man....thats messed up about PAL games

  • hmm, I am sorry for you man... I have the PAL NES from Mattel and I deactiveted the regional lockout chip that made a difference between pal A and pal B. I know, it sounds strange, but from the same moment on my NES was even reading NTSC Games without any problems...

    If shipping wouldnt be that expensive I would organise you a european one - GRRRR

  • Why were there different standards anyways?

  • Historical and political reasons.

  • Oh, you got the purple screen instead of the grey one! I thought it was just my messed up modded unit that did that. Does all american consoles get that?

    Anyway, weird to see that stuff! Only thing I've noticed is some minor slowdowns in music, but that was some seriously weird stuff! Interesting to say the least! Gotta watch this more closely when I get home from work!

  • are you going to the 789 gathering

  • i think this video is an excellent example of the PAL/NTSC differences, its sucks that you can't play them properly, even though it was kind of that youtuber who sent them games to you, something good has come out of it as this video shows. Now all you need is for someone to send you a PAL NES to test the NTSC games on a PAL system.

  • Shoot, running Battletoad that slowly would make the driving section soooo much easier.

  • Pal NES games (on a pal NES and a pal TV) run 17% slower than the NTSC version and have borders top and bottom of the screen due to different aspect ratios of American and European TV systems.

    Actually the European NES is somewhat better than the US one, as the model that says "NES Version" on the front can play NTSC games no problem. (For some bizarre reason the "Mattel Version" has regional lockout)

  • I like the Shinya Arino poster. heh

  • Thats very weird

  • thats crazy

  • thats strange!

    i have a moded mega drive and all of my pal games when played at 60hz play just the same as the NTSC versions with no probs at all and 90% of my games are pal.

    it must be the way the ntsc nes and pal nes were built??? or maybe the way the pal games were programed???

    anyways thats a bummer man!

  • ohh and what mod have you got cos it would probebly be best to have the 50+60hz switch and the language switch=)

  • never had such problems, maybe its because most os televisions here have work with both pal and ntsc regions,dont know

  • LOL you should just play more like this :D

  • I wonder how ntsc games would do on a PAL system...

  • Slower and the music will be lower in pitch!

  • PAL NESes run at 50Hz, which resulted in games running slower and having borders.

    So some publishers tried to be cool and speed up the game so that it plays the same speed as NTSC.

    But you'd still get the borders on a PAL game because the TV aspect ratio is different.

  • you should of let the timer go down on super mario the tempo of the music would be insane

  • Interesting stuff as usual Luke!~

  • granted, maybe its a difference between viewing a movie or playing a game. but when you switch a modern console to PAL-60 with 60hz, the games are on the visual gameplay identical to their NTSC counterparts. ive seen it. but on old NES games you are right 133Mhzz. today they just want basically the same standard to reduce costs. thats why PAL-60/NTSC and HDTV in the future

  • LOL! luke! over clocked mario and over clocked ninja gaidan/ shadow warriors. it sounds funny! too bad on BT tho, very awesome game, and very hard!

  • btw, i confess, even a totally speed corrected conversion either PAL or NTSC or whatever of "Battletoads" is totally unplayable for me... at least after the second level i think...lol

  • i'd actually like hearing that mario brothers at that speed lol

    Tim

  • i think the french SECAM was also in eastern europe and had also 50hz. do they still have it?

  • They do, and they use PAL region consoles with RGB connectors or transcoders because nobody cares about SECAM.

  • yeah its only a conversion problem. the PAL standart isnt slower or something. they just made it 50hz and since most developers made games first for NTSC regions, most of those conversions came at least with borders cause of the resolution and most times with wrong speed or glitches. so they introduced PAL-60 to make basically the same game for every region and to reduce costs. 60hz seems on an crt less flickering but NTSC crt had REALLY bad color cmprd to PAL. today lcds these are no problems

  • I got some PAL Sega Saturn games from Australia, Panzer Dragoon and Exhumed. Exhumed works just fine, but there are some problems with Panzer Dragoon. The health bar is missing and for some reason you only get one life, even on easy mode. Other than that the game is very playable.

    Like many other people said here, you're problems come from differences between PAL and NTSC. If you really want to play those PAL games properly, you'll need a 60mhz/50mhz switch installed, or possibly a famiclone.

  • Very Interesting. Thanks for posting.

  • i freakin love dragon warrior 3

  • LOL 8:35

  • Battletoads is widely known for being a bitch to emulate and to properly run since it depends on so many programming quirks that almost ANYTHING that is slightly off from spec makes it glitch.

    Hey Luke, you can replace the crystal oscillator on your NES to get the games running at the proper speed, just use the same frequency value that PAL consoles use. Of course your NES will now output 50Hz video with a 4.43 MHz color burst so make sure your TV supports that first :-P.

  • Battletoads is to powerful to handle!!

  • lol. i kinda like the sped up version of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1... :)

  • at the end this problem ends with hdtv which substitutes both standarts. technically both standarts share the same history, but pal is advanced as it had higher resolution (thats why the black bars for ntsc conversions) and it has no color weakness which ntsc always had (ntsc hue problem). but the 50/60 hz problem is there. today all modern pal consoles (ps3,xbox360) have pal-60 with 60 hz identical to ntsc refresh rate, so this problem doesnt really exist anymore. but for old consoles its true.

  • PAL games have slower music on NTSC TV's thats normal

  • oops i meant faster :P

  • that star wars game was the one that i had on gameboy !

  • Techno rave Nes action

  • Super Mario Bros. sounds even worse than the PAL Virtual Console version XD

  • there´s always a problem on playing pal on ntsc on every console, what happen is some sound problems, half screen displayed, black and white screen and so many other things.

    NTSC rules!

  • PAL all the way!

  • Dude, that throat sounds rough still. I hope that you're getting enough rest these days. Maybe you should stay away from the green Pepsi. :)

    As someone earlier mentioned, when you play the 60hz version of Sonic The Hedgehog on a 50hz system, it sounds like the game is running in slow motion! Sonic the Slowhog indeed.

    Why couldn't publishers try harder for 50/60hz compatibility! Oh wait, that was brought up earlier too.

    Awesome vid. STAY AWESOME dude!

  • interesting test luke :) (btw have read my pm?)

  • amazing lesson

  • lol - crazy stuff matey :D

  • If you wanna see how screwed we were try to play those games on a 50hz console.

    A good example is PAL "Sonic the Slowhog".

    Wah, thinking about the time before i imported games make me sick to my stomach.

    It's like the vidoe game companies say "eF you" to pretty much half of the world. Especially the Playstation days were horrible for me... 25% Longer loading times...brrrr

  • Don't forget those god awful black bars ;)

  • Sonic The Hedgehog for the PAL region is quite an insult IMO. On the contrary, Super Mario Bros. was one of the first games ever to be speed-corrected for the European market.

  • 50Hz in my opinion is better than 60Hz, 60Hz runs 10% faster but 50Hz is a lot more detailed and better.

  • 20% faster, actually.  :P

  • Wow that is so weird. Thanks for showing us

  • ...pop that in ?

  • Woah that's a little messed up! :D

    I've never understood the whole 50/60 mess :P PAL TV's run 50Hz 576i and NTSC 60Hz 480i.

    Were developers just too lazy back then, could they not be bothered to properly optimise games for PAL? xD Hell, if games were fully optimised for PAL they would look a lot better than NTSC, 576i FTW!

    TV's should have used one standard from the start, why did regions take different standards? Why not 567i 60Hz everywhere. Meh now i'm just rambling haha

    Great video 5/5

  • At least nowadays every country uses the same high-definition standards :)

    720p/1080i/1080p FTW! :D

  • Historical and political reasons gave us the wonders of three incompatible TV standards.

  • yeah thats right! secam?

  • PAL is a German standard, France wasn't going to adopt a German standard so they developed their own.

  • For a long ass time developers would do lazy pal conversions, meaning borders and 17.5% slower gameplay. Super Mario Kart was really different as a result. It went on right up to around Mario 64, but most companies did proper conversions.

    UK developers would normally do proper conversions, Donkey Kong Country on Pal Snes being a good example.

    Pal in theory is a lot higher picture quality than NTSC, but in gaming it didn't always turn out that way.

    Although UK TV picture is better than US.

  • Gaming usually needs fast on-screen action, PAL being slower in that respect. Even if the developers did a perfect conversion, the game will still play different due to the lower framerate, enough to throw off expert gamers and speedrun competitions.

    Check out Mario Kart speed-runners. They have 50 and 60 Hz categories for every game, even the properly converted ones because the games play intrinsically different.

  • Dude all I'm going to say is welcome to our world!

  • Weird how it's not consistant with what it does exactly. Now I need to try who NTSC games do on a PAL machine haha. Going to test that out for sure in a bit.

  • i have 2 ntsc games for my NES, they work fine, no problems or glitches at all....its really weird that PAL games dont work on an NTSC system, but NTSC games work fine on a PAL system...

  • I have a bunch but only tested them on a NTSC system so far, but it is really werid that it works the other way around...

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  • glad you liked the games man :D....sucks about the problems...at lest you have them for collection purposes :D

  • lol great vid

  • obvious i know but you would have to covert the signal from 60hz to 50hz. this can be done on a snes, mega drive, saturn etc but i have never seen it done on a nes. games made by rare are meant to worst which is why battletoads gliches. get superdan88 to send you a pal nes he has four or so.