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Topic: PAL and NTSC NES games

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TechnoCharlie

Why is the PAL NES games slower then the NTSC games. But the PAL version of Super Mario Bros is actually faster :/ Can someone plz tell me why?

TechnoCharlie

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KingMike

You have it backwards, it's the HARDWARE that's slower, the games needed to be SPED UP to compensate (so the hardware slowdown will it slow it back to normal speed).

TechnoCharlie wrote:

Why is the PAL NES games slower then the NTSC games. But the PAL version of Super Mario Bros is actually faster :/ Can someone plz tell me why?

Because Nintendo bothered to speed up the game to offset the PAL slowdown except they sped it up a bit too much.
(the NES has no real clock in it, so game developers had to get creative on ways to judge time. Often they'd just count how many times the video chip refreshed the screen, which is 60 per second in an NTSC console. But if they didn't bother to update the code for PAL (which refreshes only 50 times per second), then each "second" by the game's timer would be 1.2 seconds in real time. Other games had special tricks like a special "hidden" sprite (put in the corners where they'd likely be invisible on CRTs but may be exposed on newer TVs) to indicate the start of a frame, and some later carts had more advanced mapper chips (like MMC3) that had timers.

Edited on by KingMike

KingMike

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