Does anyone know anything about the Xbox 360 NTSC Vs PAL

Leeram · Post by **Leeram** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:08 am

I've researchd and researched uising the web to find out one basic simple question about PAL vs NTSC with the new 360. All I can find are people jerking off about HDTV, progressive scan and how it's going to rock their world and wether PAL HDTV is better than NTSC HDTV or not.

For me none of that matters and even if I did my question would still stand. It appears that people seemed to have forgotten (indeed if display fanboys ever even knew) that the PAL machines historically run at 50Hz because fo the screen refresh rate and so therefor the game actually goes slower.

So my question is,

Has anyone managed to find out if the Xbox 360 PAL version will run games at the same speed as the NTSC counterpart.

I guess not and that I'm going to have to buy American, but someone once told me that the Xbox itself didn't have a speed difference because it used software timers, not screen refresh rates to govern the speed of the games.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Leeram

neorichieb1971 · Post by **neorichieb1971** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:55 am

I am sure that it does have a 60hz setting, all software will be double standard.

Thunder Force · Post by **Thunder Force** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 11:01 am

If it is like the first Xbox's PAL support, then it should have an in-built PAL 50hz / PAL 60hz selector in the dashboard, which each developer has been strongly suggested - but not required - to fully support. In practice I think this meant on Xbox 1 that most games support the 60hz mode to make them equivalent to NTSC versions, but a few major titles still don't, defaulting to 50hz or malfunctioning slightly under PAL 60hz. Meaning an NTSC machine was still superior. Until MS prove otherwise, expect something similar for X360

Post by **system11** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 1:03 pm

Thunder Force wrote:If it is like the first Xbox's PAL support, then it should have an in-built PAL 50hz / PAL 60hz selector in the dashboard, which each developer has been strongly suggested - but not required - to fully support. In practice I think this meant on Xbox 1 that most games support the 60hz mode to make them equivalent to NTSC versions, but a few major titles still don't, defaulting to 50hz or malfunctioning slightly under PAL 60hz. Meaning an NTSC machine was still superior. Until MS prove otherwise, expect something similar for X360

It's mostly EA games which ignore the 50/60 or make limitations based on it. Sounds about right really. And of course, while you get 60hz all the time, we get it most of the time, -and- we get more scanlines, -and- RGB - so it seems Europe didn't get such a bad deal for once

EDIT: And I couldn't care less about HD-TV. Hardware makers are desperate to sell us all the next big thing, and it shows. What a shambolic clusterfuck of standards and formats.

Specineff · Post by **Specineff** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 7:59 pm

Yeah. And I think it will take another 10 years for analog broadcast to go away. And to think they want to end it next year. Ha.

Leeram · Post by **Leeram** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 10:18 pm

Thanks everyone. I'm not willing to take the risk about 50/60hz. So I'll be buying USA or Jap.

I find it really fucking frustrating that in this day and age we're still getting games that run slower than the USA when there's no need whatsoever. Ive been playing games since the early 90's on import machines and not had a problem on any tv I have ever owned. It's just fucking stupid to keep releasing stuff using the fucking aerial cable and PAL 50. Every TV in the UK can support RGB why not use that as the standard? Dumbasses.

If software timers were used, the game could run at the normal speed and the TV just display the game running at 50hz, the game wouldnt need to synch to the TV. People on our TV's don't move 17% slower than in the USA. When I watch a film it doesn't go any slower, so why should the games.

This brings me back to the original question I had a year ago. If I was playing PGR2 on Live! and I play PGR2 at 50hz and someone in the USA is playing at 60hz, how does the system cope? on a straight run the USA machine will win by a large margin every single time.

Sorry about the language but this really pisses me off. We always get robbed blind in the UK when it comes to video games and they can't even be arsed giving us properly deveoped systems.

Cheers

Leeram

Thunder Force · Post by **Thunder Force** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 12:37 am

Leeram wrote:If I was playing PGR2 on Live! and I play PGR2 at 50hz and someone in the USA is playing at 60hz, how does the system cope? on a straight run the USA machine will win by a large margin every single time.

On some Xbox Live games like Burnout 3, the online matchup system won't even allow 50hz PAL TV users to race with 60hz PAL TV / 60hz NTSC TV users. On most other games, it does allow 50hz and 60hz to play together, using some kind of frame adjustment thing to alter the speed of the 50hz player, I think (maybe someone else can elaborate, I don't recall the details).

neorichieb1971 · Post by **neorichieb1971** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:03 am

Sega released the sega saturn on PAL with scart leads. It caused an influx of people coming back to the store wanting coaxial cables which hardly any stores were stocking. It was a shambles.

Contrary to what big budget spenders can do with import gear. The majority of people still use these technologies on crappy TV's that are more than 10 years old quite a lot of the time.

Nowadays the support is hardware and software based, which means everyone is catered for.

At least in HD, both systems now run at the same line resolution. So no more borders.