Did you grow up with PAL or NTSC Sonic?

What about Sonic CD? Was it slow on PAL hardware too?

 

Let's put it this way... Every single Mega Drive game run slower on PAL machines, since the hardware couldn't just ditch some frames per second on the fly to kep the original speed (something that I believe many Play Station games used to do, causing jerky scrolling but full game speed).

Sounds like one isolated case. They might have burnt the incorrect ROM for some reason.

Some pics of that cartridge's board would be interesting, though.

 

Grew up on PAL of Sonic 1, the original revision.
Still always prefer to play them on their original hardware though, so I'm okay with the lack of fast music.

 

It's not. I remember a few years back, both a friend and I went through a lot of second-hand Sonic cartridges because we each wanted versions with and without the rev01 deformation. Rev01 is not so common though, but not really 'rare' as such.

 

Have you guys noticed any differences in the package, cartridge or box for these v.1 games?

Also, the numbers printed on the chip inside might give us an idea of the date they were made. I'm curious to see if these were from a limited, late rerelease of the game due to constant high demand.

 

There seemed to be no difference at all in the packaging, but given that store used to keep the cartridges separate from the cases, it's totally possible that the clerk could have put a rev01 cartridge in a rev00 case, not caring about the difference.

 

More powerful machines can just calculate 1 extra frame of logic every 5 frames, which is very easy to do, but old consoles didn't have the processing power for that. The correct way to fix games for PAL regions is to change all offsets, accelerations and whatever physics values so that everything happens at the same rate in spite of the different number of frames per second.

I'm not aware of many games that did this though. Since fixed-point values with limited precision are used for physics, I imagine that it would be impossible to fix them perfectly, and the result would not play exactly like the original (the height of jumps would differ by a few pixels, and other details like that), and this could break the game in certain places. Since both approaches to converting games to 50Hz have their issues, not changing anything and letting it play slower is much easier for the developers.

 

NTSC (as being form the US)
I listened to speed differences between PAL and NTSC. (form the videos Shadic posted)

That sounds just weird to me.

As mentioned before, calculations for the game being frame based would cause some slow downs.
(Interesting to see later games, namely computer games go time based, but that's another story.)

 

NTSC.

Wow, I'd heard but never witnessed the European difference. I'm so very sorry, other part of the world.

 

PAL. I never knew there was a difference until emulation a few years later, but I still don't mind the PAL one. My grandfather had it and that's where I played it.

First sonic game was Sonic 1 on SMS though, thats what I Had at my house until my 5th Birthday. I got Cosmic Spacehead with it, and damn is that game fun =).

 

NTSC sonic. I grew up in Texas.

 

50hz till Dreamcast came out for me, although when you play something in 50hz it's more like a movie I reckon. I prefer 60hz of course though.

 

Super Mario Bros 1 did... and I think that's it. =|

 

I know Rocket Knight Adventures does. I think it's reasonable to expect any game which is region-locked to also fix the gameplay to be the correct speed in all regions.

 

I started with Sonic & Knuckles Collection, so my very first Sonic game was fine.
I then played S3K on MD, just thinking "Huh, this seems a bit slower than I remember it," but not giving it much thought besides that.
Then I played Sonic 2 on an emulator, with the NTSC version (I didn't know it, it was just set to that by default). It was fine; the fact that I didn't like it as much as S3K had nothing to do with the framerate.
I decided to play Sonic 1 on an emulator, again with the NTSC version, and all was well with the world until I decided to replay Sonic 1 and 2 again on Virtual Console. It had been quite a while since I'd played Sonic 2, so I didn't notice anything with the speed, and the music was perfect. But then finally, I sit down, download, and begin playing Sonic 1...


FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

 

Thankfully, I enjoyed good 'ol NTSC format. I don't think I even would have enjoyed it at the PAL rate.

 

Yeah, but I imagine a lot of the appeal would be lost; Super Mario Bros. was probably faster than Sonic 1 in Europe.

...Actually, that brings up an interesting point. Did the NES and SNES suffer from this?

 

My assumption is "yes", considering the PAL format of 50Hz is hardly proprietary to Sega.

NTSC here, although I did get to dabble with PAL while I lived in England from mid-'96 to mid-'99, including running a copy of NTSC S3&K on a PAL Mega Drive (worked fine, IIRC, but it was letterboxed for some reason).

 

PAL is 625 lines (576 visible raster) versus NTSC's 525 lines (486 visible raster), so if the game isn't modified to use 320x240 (V30) rather than 320x224 (V28) it looks letterboxed. I'm tempted to try and alter Sonic 1 to use V30 and run at the correct speed in 50Hz.