ELI5. Why did European releases of older games(SNES and PS1 etc..) run slower than their North American counterparts?
In: Technology
A bit more technical detail:
Older games were meant to run at a very specific framerate which for TVs in North America is ~30 frames per second. Everything in the game was tied to this rate as a way to keep time, so an action that is supposed to take 1/2 a second would be programmed to run for 15 frames.
TVs in other regions didn’t run at ~30 fps, for instance PAL in Europe ran at 25 fps. This means that same software meant for NTSC regions would run at 83% speed it was intended. That same 15-frame action would actually take 0.6 seconds instead because it doesn’t know the displayed framerate is lower than expected.
It’s possible to compensate but requires a fair bit of engineering and testing. Companies found it easier to just ignore the issue.
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