[schnitzelstoat]

> Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

[kace91]

>So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

That was my assumption as well! But nope, gameplay was coupled to framerate for a surprising range of years.

You can see comparisons on YouTube, check the music of the pal/ntsc version of sonic for the genesis/megadrive.

Apparently it was still happening to some extent during the PSX era. I remember the turn meter bars in FF7 filled very slow, and this explains it.

[butlike]

If you have an original copy of Grim Fandango, the elevator-and-forklift puzzle is impossible without a patch, since the scene moves at (iirc) the processors clock speed, so modern CPUs ran too quickly to make the action possible to solve the puzzle.

This is obviously fixed in the remastered version, though

[CTDOCodebases]

> Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

Yes and no. Some games play at a similar speed but some (most if I recall correctly) weren't modified for the PAL market so they play slow and the image is squashed down. Street Fighter II on the SNES (PAL) is a classic example of this.

[schnitzelstoat]

Damn, Street Fighter 2 on the SNES is literally the first game I remember ever playing. I never knew I was playing an inferior version!

[Findecanor]

The vertical resolution was also different. Some games developed for NTSC got black bars, or a silly banner in the PAL version. Many PAL games were not ported for NTSC regions at all.