Nintendo Throws Rare Bone To Modern EU Gamers Via N64 60 Hz Toggle (arstechnica.com) 13
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.
Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)
Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.
Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)
Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.
I don't think this is as big an issue (Score:2)
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A lot of that was due to NTSC not being great for colour, and because in the US there were a lot of smaller TV networks using cheaper equipment. In Europe there were fewer channels and they tended to be big national broadcasters with high end video recording equipment.
The other reason is that back then format conversion hardware wasn't great either.
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It's not about the game running at 50fps. It's about the way the console was designed such that everything was timed to the TV VBI rate. For all consoles up to the PSX generation it mattered what the TV VBI r
"Slightly higher pixel resolution"? (Score:1)
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It wasn't really the cartridges that were the problem. The Playstation didn't have much RAM so although the CD could store a lot of data, only a small part of it could be used at a time. It meant the PS could have things like FMV, but as we know FMV was mostly crap back then.
The N64 suffered from having a somewhat difficult development system and hardware that needed special tuning, meaning that porting games and engines from other platforms was hard. It had a very small amount of texture memory so textures
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The N64 didn't have much RAM out of the box either, you had to have the RAM upgrade for that. And since lots of people didn't have it, lots of publishers didn't include support for it, so games were less impressive than they otherwise could have been.
As it turned out, using the CDROM format was actually an important step because it let the games be cheaper.
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Cartridge based systems don't need a massive amount of RAM though, because they have a very large ROM to hold all the constant data like textures, geometry, audio samples and code.
CD being cheaper is a fair point though. Interesting that Nintendo seems to have made the same mistake twice there. First with the Famicom and the Disk System that was made mostly to reduce costs when there was a ROM memory shortage, and then again with the N64.
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Cartridge based systems don't need a massive amount of RAM though, because they have a very large ROM to hold all the constant data like textures, geometry, audio samples and code.
Yeah, but RAM is faster, so you are going to get into a position of having to cache some stuff anyway, or be slow. Having to read textures from ROM is a good reason to have a very low screen resolution... to reduce your fill rate.
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Texture RAM was only 4k though so there wasn't a huge benefit to having high memory bandwidth to feed it, given the tiny amount of data involved. Also while the ROM was about half the sequential read speed of RAM, the RDRAM has very high latency.
ASP FULL FORM (Score:1)
JB (Score:1)