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Sony’s classic PlayStation games on PS Plus appear to be 50hz – even in non-PAL regions

ManaByte

Gold Member
Rear touch pad? Out of the many Vita games I own I honestly couldnt tell you one I used the touch pad for

Thats a lame duck excuse. A fair few even run on the Vita TV.

That's not true. They only run on the PlayStation TV via the whitelist hack. They weren't officially supported.
 

Barakov

Member

PlayStation 1 and PSP games started appearing on Asian region PlayStation Stores earlier today, ahead of the revamped PlayStation Plus coming to select markets on Tuesday.

A user playing the PSOne version of Ape Escape via the Indonesian PS Store first noticed that it appears to be based on the PAL version of the game, because it credits Sony Computer Entertainment Europe during its intro (instead of America or Japan) and runs at 25fps instead of 30fps.

All other first-party PSOne games on the “Classics” line-up, including Everybody’s Golf, Wild Arms, Jumping Flash and Kurushi, also appear to be based on the European PAL versions, VGC has confirmed (see the Twitter embed below).

In addition, both Worms games, World Party and Armageddon, appear to be based on their PAL versions. However, other third-party games on the service such as Tekken 2, Syphon Filter, Abe’s Oddysee and Mr. Driller appear to be based on the NTSC versions.

PAL is a video format used in many regions including Europe and Australia, which runs at 50hz compared to NTSC’s faster 60hz refresh rate. Many PAL versions of early console games are considered inferior due to their slower speed, with some even sporting borders at the top and bottom of the screen.

Indonesia uses the PAL video format, so it would perhaps be unsurprising if it’s issued European version of some classic PlayStation games on PS4 and PS5, even if it is inferior to the NTSC original.

However, VGC has verified that the exact same PAL versions of Sony’s first-party games are what are being offered on the Taiwan PS Store – a region which uses the NTSC video format. This could suggest that Sony plans to roll out PAL games globally.



evil eye stare GIF
 

Fess

Member
You're welcome. We'll have to wait and see first exactly what they did.

And if needed, we can ask Sony to add to the settings an option in the PS1 emulator to remove black bars and another one to force 60Hz.
How do we actually ask Sony?
Unfortunately I don’t know anything about this besides being noisy on the boards lol

Nintendo did something strange, don’t remember if it was on Wii or WiiU, they ran SNES PAL games in 50fps on a 60hz output, creating a stutter from uneven frame times.
All I know is that I don’t want that. Then I’ll honestly rather play games in smooth 50fps even if they’re slower.
 

Fess

Member
meanwhile PC players experiencing the real upgrade.
3868346-duckstation.jpg
I like emulation but unofficial emulation isn’t the same thing. I really appreciate what Sony are doing here, official legacy emulation is fantastic, I just hope they don’t mess it up.
One big issue is no disc support though. They should let us register game licenses on a PC somehow, which we could then use to download the games on PS5. I still have a whole shelf with PS1 games I’d love to play.
 
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ManaByte

Gold Member
I was playing Ape Escape 2 last night on the PS5 and the PS2 emulated version of that is the PAL one as well (complete with the SCEE credit at the beginning). So I don't think they're going to change this in the US.

EDIT: Oh, it's because Sony published the game in Japan and Europe, and UbiSoft published the US one. So the only English version Sony can re-release is the PAL one. Explains the accents in the game.
 
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Ezquimacore

Banned
I like emulation but unofficial emulation isn’t the same thing. I really appreciate what Sony are doing here, official legacy emulation is fantastic, I just hope they don’t mess it up.
One big issue is no disc support though. They should let us register game licenses on a PC somehow, which we could then use to download the games on PS5. I still have a whole shelf with PS1 games I’d love to play.
not fantastic compared with new textures, reshades, 60 fps and10k resolution. Sony and Nintendo are lazy as f when it comes to "legacy emulation" Emulation on PC is king for old and even new hardware. I'm not expecting them to match a PC but at least they can try something...
lzBXk5t.png
ECBfbMl.png
 
I like emulation but unofficial emulation isn’t the same thing. I really appreciate what Sony are doing here, official legacy emulation is fantastic, I just hope they don’t mess it up.
One big issue is no disc support though. They should let us register game licenses on a PC somehow, which we could then use to download the games on PS5. I still have a whole shelf with PS1 games I’d love to play.

I'm REALLY hoping Sony can work something out when it comes to English translations of Japan-only games. There are already fan groups which do this; maybe they can enter an agreement with them in some way? Though there's also the issue of licensing rights for some of those games Sony would also have to clear though. Some of the original devs and pubs aren't even around anymore, rights could be split up among a ton of companies

not fantastic compared with new textures, reshades, 60 fps and10k resolution. Sony and Nintendo are lazy as f when it comes to "legacy emulation" Emulation on PC is king for old and even new hardware. I'm not expecting them to match a PC but at least they can try something...
lzBXk5t.png
ECBfbMl.png

Don't see a point in playing Tomba 2 in 10K, but it's a nice option to have I guess.
 
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ReBurn

Gold Member
Rear touch pad? Out of the many Vita games I own I honestly couldnt tell you one I used the touch pad for

Thats a lame duck excuse. A fair few even run on the Vita TV.
Most of the time the rear touchpad was used for L2/R2 functionality in Vita games. Almost all of them could map to DualShock 4 or DualSense controller.
 

Ezquimacore

Banned
I'm REALLY hoping Sony can work something out when it comes to English translations of Japan-only games. There are already fan groups which do this; maybe they can enter an agreement with them in some way? Though there's also the issue of licensing rights for some of those games Sony would also have to clear though. Some of the original devs and pubs aren't even around anymore, rights could be split up among a ton of companies



Don't see a point in playing Tomba 2 in 10K, but it's a nice option to have I guess.
that's the point, the requeriments for that are so low that you don't have to, but you do it anyways. plus anything above 4k on a 4k display looks delicious.
 

tygertrip

Member
PAL as a TV standard is superior to NTSC in terms of colour accuracy and resolution so there might be a situation where old NTSC -> Rec 2020 output, is worse than old PAL -> Rec 2020 output. Or more likely, because the PAL versions of games released later they would have had more bug fixes and more localization, so from a re-release business point of view are superior. Also, the licensing agreements will be later too, so might reduce legal work too for re-issue using the last updated contract.
FFS, 50 fps isn't worth any of that. Ridiculous.
 

01011001

Banned
PAL as a TV standard is superior to NTSC in terms of colour accuracy and resolution so there might be a situation where old NTSC -> Rec 2020 output, is worse than old PAL -> Rec 2020 output. Or more likely, because the PAL versions of games released later they would have had more bug fixes and more localization, so from a re-release business point of view are superior. Also, the licensing agreements will be later too, so might reduce legal work too for re-issue using the last updated contract.

pretty sure almost no game was actually changed to take advantage of PAL back in the day. games still ran at the same resolution as NTSC.

that's why alon with the slower speed you usually had the often called "PAL Bars" on top and bottom, because the game runs at NTSC resultion which leaves unused lines on the top and the bottom...

so the inage looks squished and the game runs slow if you play a PAL game on og hardware
 

tygertrip

Member
Honestly these topics just make me face-palm, the sheer ignorance of the differences between refresh rates, run-speeds, and output encoding formats, not to mention localization differences is indefensible.

Just going 50hz ewww... is not smart. Its just not.
How DARE someone have a different opinion! 🙄 Fucking sad.
 

yurinka

Member
How do we actually ask Sony?
Unfortunately I don’t know anything about this besides being noisy on the boards lol
I assume in the same way people complained in forums or twitter about the discount for the PS+ tier upgrade, if there's the same demand for this maybe they also take note.
 

Fess

Member
I assume in the same way people complained in forums or twitter about the discount for the PS+ tier upgrade, if there's the same demand for this maybe they also take note.
There won’t be. The PS+ problem made even the most loyal fans angry, I’m pretty sure that’s why Sony looked into it. I think it’ll take serious deep dives by DF and NX until any bigger amount of people even take notice on PS1 emulation issues, people in the 20s might not even know what PAL and NTSC is.
 
that's the point, the requeriments for that are so low that you don't have to, but you do it anyways. plus anything above 4k on a 4k display looks delicious.

Eh, there's something charming to me in playing retro games at the resolution they were designed for...more or less. CRT filters and all that fun, makes them feel homely.

pretty sure almost no game was actually changed to take advantage of PAL back in the day

Actually a lot of games were tuned for PAL territories. Check out some of the DF Retro videos, they mention it a few times.
 

01011001

Banned
Actually a lot of games were tuned for PAL territories. Check out some of the DF Retro videos, they mention it a few times.

they were in terms of speed, sure, like Mario World on SNES was changed to feel about as fast as NTSC I think, but the weird squished resolution was still an issue there.

and even up to the PS2 era most games were just really badly optimised. Devil May Cry 1 was an especially bad example.

thankfully, PAL60 became a thing back then of course, but PAL60 was not guaranteed on these consoles either. the Xbox and GC had a better track record supporting it but still not every game was 100% optimised or used PAL60.

on Xbox, one prime example was Onimusha, which was also famously a terrible 50hz only PAL version with slower speed and "PAL bars"
 
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It wouldn't hurt Sony to have a dedicated team for this with open communication with the community every once in a while. It's such an easy win to listen to the community when it comes to stuff like this. The devil is in the details here and it isn't just a matter of making the games available.

I have extreme interest in playing PS1 games on PS5 with proper CRT filters at 4K but pretty much zero interest to play them as they are, with no control of the presentation. They need to copy the best features of emulators and they have time to do it.
 
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PAL wasn't bad for video and broadcasts, to be fair.

The issue was the decision of doing games in 50 Hz when most if not all the equipment supported 60 Hz anywho. I've never forced 60 Hz on a monitor/TV that couldn't pull it, even on 1980's ones. That and 288p, similarly by the way every TV works, 244p would work; as would 480i instead of 576i.

But at that point 576i actually had some resolution advantages, framerate be dammed if the game used full framebuffers and some did. But that was PS2/GC/Wii.

EDIT: As for this thread, they somehow did the same on the PSone Mini so they had every feedback they needed to avoid it.
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Rear touch pad? Out of the many Vita games I own I honestly couldnt tell you one I used the touch pad for

Thats a lame duck excuse. A fair few even run on the Vita TV.
The rear touch pad can easily be remapped to the front touch pad, or the L2/R2 (that it was mainly used for anyhow), IMO.

Most games allowed you to turn off touch controls as well.
 

Ezquimacore

Banned
Eh, there's something charming to me in playing retro games at the resolution they were designed for...more or less. CRT filters and all that fun, makes them feel homely.



Actually a lot of games were tuned for PAL territories. Check out some of the DF Retro videos, they mention it a few times.
Make sense but that's why I'm talking about options. They could mimic how emulation in PC is handled. You can play the original with the original aspect ratio, but also customize and upscale the resolution and change aspect ratio etc. Instead all these console "emulators" do is add a save option and cheap filters when they are capable of more.
 

Fahdis

Member
Fuck everyone's games. Give me Japan's version of Ace Combat 3 with English Subtitles and an Anime about it to boot!
 
they were in terms of speed, sure, like Mario World on SNES was changed to feel about as fast as NTSC I think, but the weird squished resolution was still an issue there.

and even up to the PS2 era most games were just really badly optimised. Devil May Cry 1 was an especially bad example.

thankfully, PAL60 became a thing back then of course, but PAL60 was not guaranteed on these consoles either. the Xbox and GC had a better track record supporting it but still not every game was 100% optimised or used PAL60.

on Xbox, one prime example was Onimusha, which was also famously a terrible 50hz only PAL version with slower speed and "PAL bars"

I thought PAL regions had somewhat higher resolutions? The SNES itself had lower resolution output compared to the Genesis/MegaDrive so even in NTSC regions certain games squished the image to get the same contents on-screen as MegaDrive/Genesis versions but that probably threw some things off with gameplay. Talking about multiplats though.

Make sense but that's why I'm talking about options. They could mimic how emulation in PC is handled. You can play the original with the original aspect ratio, but also customize and upscale the resolution and change aspect ratio etc. Instead all these console "emulators" do is add a save option and cheap filters when they are capable of more.

Good point; higher resolution scaling options could do well paired with more shader options. Just optimistic they'll get to adding those options soon enough; this stuff won't be 100% fleshed out from Day 1 but as long as they can add those options in a reasonable time frame I don't personally have a problem waiting a bit.
 

01011001

Banned
I thought PAL regions had somewhat higher resolutions? The SNES itself had lower resolution output compared to the Genesis/MegaDrive so even in NTSC regions certain games squished the image to get the same contents on-screen as MegaDrive/Genesis versions but that probably threw some things off with gameplay. Talking about multiplats though.

no, it was the same resolution, that's why the image was basically letterboxed and squished. I think some rare titles were optimised but not really many
 
no, it was the same resolution, that's why the image was basically letterboxed and squished. I think some rare titles were optimised but not really many

Oh I think you and I are kind of talking about two different things. Seems you're talking about the same games on same platform but in two different regions with different standards. I kind of veered off into talking about PAL & NTSC in general and multiplatform releases with certain 16-bit games.

Seems I went a bit off-track. My bad 😆
 

01011001

Banned
Oh I think you and I are kind of talking about two different things. Seems you're talking about the same games on same platform but in two different regions with different standards. I kind of veered off into talking about PAL & NTSC in general and multiplatform releases with certain 16-bit games.

Seems I went a bit off-track. My bad 😆

what I'm talking about is officially PAL releaes vs official NTSC releases

sonic_181.jpg



suee there wwre games developed for PAL regions specifically but those were really rare on console
 
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Crayon

Member
I like emulation but unofficial emulation isn’t the same thing. I really appreciate what Sony are doing here, official legacy emulation is fantastic, I just hope they don’t mess it up.
One big issue is no disc support though. They should let us register game licenses on a PC somehow, which we could then use to download the games on PS5. I still have a whole shelf with PS1 games I’d love to play.

Seeing consoles use emulators in an official capacity always seemed weird to me. For a long time until then, it was an open project thing. There were multiple projects competing but there was no money in it so they just improved things for the love of the game. They still do that. Sony emulating their own game totally makes sense of course, but I'll always think its weird. So it's inverted for me. I do feel like official emulation isn't the same thing but it's the other way around.
 

Fess

Member
Seeing consoles use emulators in an official capacity always seemed weird to me. For a long time until then, it was an open project thing. There were multiple projects competing but there was no money in it so they just improved things for the love of the game. They still do that. Sony emulating their own game totally makes sense of course, but I'll always think its weird. So it's inverted for me. I do feel like official emulation isn't the same thing but it's the other way around.
The thing with official emulation is that it’s less jank. With PS1 you need a bios dump for each region and deal with folders with files without art and descriptions etc. It can be worth the hassle if you’re doing a specific Raspberry Pie hobby project but there are times when Apple’s ”It just works” is exactly what you want even if it means stripping away some functionality.
 

Fess

Member
We modded our consoles, brought 60Htz compatible TV's and connected them with RGB scart cables. Boss mode.
Yup, I’ve been using crispy RGB scart since the early 80s, had a monitor with RGB scart for the C128, same one for the Amiga, then I used a TV with scart on SNES which was my first console, and so on. Using composite video or even worse antenna connection felt like I had eye problems.

And my PS1 collection consists of at least 50% NTSC imports.

So I’m really not a fan of PAL games, unless we talk about Commodore computers where PAL region was the biggest and most big devs were from the UK and knew how to develop PAL games.
 
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cireza

Member
Sorry you guys had to suffer that. Ouch.
Switching a Saturn in frequency is super trivial. MegaDrive is very easy as well. And SEGA always put true SCART RGB with their consoles. All of this was done on purpose. They were, by far, the best of the bunch in terms of respecting the customers.

I switched my Saturn myself. 2 points of solder on the PCB and you can access them just next to where the battery is. Super simple. I prefer having to do this, and experience the glory of SCART RGB, than having 60Hz but inferior picture quality. So I am good. Also switched my MegaDrive and 32X myself...

To be noted : games began to be optimized by SEGA pretty early. For anything 2D we would keep the black bars (because developers where not going to produce the missing graphics), but when 3D arrived, they made proper optimization most of the time.

For example, Knuckles Chaotix on 32X actually runs in 288p and you get to see more of the stage at once. This is a rare example of a 2D game optimized in resolution. Golden Axe The Duel is optimized as well. And of course, all other SEGA first party games are optimized on Saturn. The speed is always fixed, and often the resolution as well.

It was pretty shitty if you were a Sony or Nintendo player though. Close to zero effort from them. But this can be explained very easily for Sony : they had zero first party studio at first, as they pretty much bought their place in the market with third party exclusives and games. And third parties almost never cared about optimizing anything for PAL regions.
 
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Fess

Member
PAL games were all scrunched like that unless they were specially made for PAL specs?
Yeah, it’s because PAL has higher vertical resolution than NTSC.
There was no easy fix especially for 2D games, they could fill a one colored background to fit the screen but they had to edit all pixel art for characters, items, logos, backdrops to have the correct proportions.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Yeah, it’s because PAL has higher vertical resolution than NTSC.
There was no easy fix especially for 2D games, they could fill a one colored background to fit the screen but they had to edit all pixel art for characters, items, logos, backdrops to have the correct proportions.
Yikes.

I always heard about the 50 hz thing (not sure why I knew that back in the day), but didn't know any other info about PAL specs or games with squeezed looking visuals.

I dont know if many of us NTSC users would know about the effects PAL had on games. I didnt. When we'd all flip through game mags, you heard about US releases and Japan imports and rumours, which back then was important as many games came out a year earlier. But you'd never hear about comparisons vs. gaming on PAL specs - even just for interest sake what it's like to game in another part of the world, since US/Japan use same specs.
 

01011001

Banned
PAL games were all scrunched like that unless they were specially made for PAL specs?

yes, and pal specs were usually only actually the target for Home Computer games like Amiga games, because there the main market was Europe.

in the 2D era basically no game ran with PAL adjusted resolutions because the hardware was way less flexible.

once 3D consoles became a thing some rare games actually had PAL versions with adjusted resolutions for PAL.

but even with 3D consoles and their more flexible resolutions most devs didn't give a shit.
Devil May Cry 1 on PS2 still looked squished and it still ran slow even tho at that time they could have adjusted it pretty easily.

at least Nintendo and some other devs during the 8 and 16 bit eras tried to adjust game speed for PAL, like Mario in Super Mario World actually runs faster in PAL because they slightly overadjusted... the rest of the game wasn't fully adjusted tho, so some aspects still run and animate slower than NTSC... but they tried.

3D console games often didn't even adjust speed sadly.


better TVs were able of course to adjust the image, especially computer monitors (I knew a few people back then that played on Amiga monitors because they could adjust the aspect ratio easily) so you could have a more pleasing image at least in those use cases
 
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Fess

Member
Yikes.

I always heard about the 50 hz thing (not sure why I knew that back in the day), but didn't know any other info about PAL specs or games with squeezed looking visuals.

I dont know if many of us NTSC users would know about the effects PAL had on games. I didnt. When we'd all flip through game mags, you heard about US releases and Japan imports and rumours, which back then was important as many games came out a year earlier. But you'd never hear about comparisons vs. gaming on PAL specs - even just for interest sake what it's like to game in another part of the world, since US/Japan use same specs.
To be honest us europeans often had no clue how bad things were either. There was the odd censorship like Super Contra being called Super Probotector and the soldiers being swapped to robots etc, but there wasn’t any real tech talk about PAL and NTSC differences. The PS1 made people aware of lots of things, like what framerate was since everything started to stutter when the norm changed from 60 to 30fps, and PAL differences came with that when people realized games only ran at 50 or 25fps in Europe.
 

ksdixon

Member
EEEEMMUUULLAAATTTIIOOOONNNN. As a kid, i had a SFC, a japanese Saturn and PSX because i would never pay full price after playing Sonic at 60Hzvs 50. Pal sucks and has always been. People should experince once in their life Street Fighter 2 at 50Hz! 😂🤷‍♂️😱🤦‍♂️

F*ck you Sony. You should have gave us the OPTION to choose our rom. You won’t get my money on this. At least, we can create an US account and pay with cards from eBay!

i believe that's how i once bought RE2 PSONE and Dino Crisis 2 through PS1-on-PS3, on the USA account because Sony hadn't deemed worthy to release them on the UK PStore. The F'n Idiots.
 
i believe that's how i once bought RE2 PSONE and Dino Crisis 2 through PS1-on-PS3, on the USA account because Sony hadn't deemed worthy to release them on the UK PStore. The F'n Idiots.
I'm buying Japan and US games all the time... It has never been so easy since the PS account is not region lock!
 
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