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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

> and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color

This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color.

The last thing you wanted to see in NTSC was bright red because you'd continue to see it smear for at least 1/4 of the screen to the right. NTSC "Safe" red wasn't really red. Run a broadcast safe filter on 255,0,0 and see how far off it goes. Should be somewhere around 180,0,0 IIRC. The days of looking at vectorscope to see the red point shoot off while everything else was much closer. When it became easier to get digital images to tape, we'd have to adjust the chroma down on the TBC to bring it back into legal limits which would mean the rest of the other colors would get squashed when the client didn't work in NTSC safe color palletes.

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> This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color.

SECAM = System Essentially Contrary to the American Method

PAL = Perfection At Last

I thought PAL was 'Picture Always Lousy'

SD just sucked.

I want a time machine to go back and prevent the US decision makers to not fret about keeping a color system backwards compatible with B&W. I don't care to use the time machine to prevent war, making stock picks or sports bets. I just want to make my future career a little less insane by stopping this idiotic (in hindsight) decision. If there's enough time, I'd try to convince them to keep working on progressive scan and avoid more complications to my future career by not needing to deal with interlacing issues.

laughs in PAL

Weren't NTSC somewhat also grainier with more pronounced horizontal gaps between each scanline? Certainly seemed so.

Yes, but at a higher refresh rate - 525 horizontal scan lines @ 60hz vs 625 @50hz.

Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency.

>Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency.

It doesn't have to be. Japan has a split power grid with 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west, but television frequency is 60Hz on both sides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/m...

This explains why western Japan is so much further ahead than eastern Japan. Everything is just faster there.

There was a computer you could switch between 50 and 60 Hz with a button press. This controlled the CPU clock too so you got a faster computer with 60 Hz. But I can't remember what computer it was? Can't have been the Amiga or Atari even though they also could do it, has to have been an older one?

Are you thinking of the Turbo button on PCs?

I've personally never seen the ability to switch from mains frequency. That's a switch on the back of the PSU that typical goes from 240v or 120v.

The turbo button and mains frequency are 2 totally different things.

No, not the turbo button, it was the 50/60 Hz software switch that made the computer faster. Hm, might just have been that the gfx chip was working less in 50 Hz come to think of it...

I do remember seeing several computers in the 80s having this switch, but they were all modded. They also required you to have a more expensive monitor that could handle the format change (PAL/NTSC and 50/60hz)

It was possible of course, but there are good reasons they were intrinsically linked:

The AC power line frequency was used for the vertical refresh rate for two reasons. The first reason was that the television's vacuum tube was susceptible to interference from the unit's power supply, including residual ripple. This could cause drifting horizontal bars (hum bars). Using the same frequency reduced this, and made interference static on the screen and therefore less obtrusive. The second reason was that television studios would use AC lamps, filming at a different frequency would cause strobing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate#Televisions

You could also play PAL on 60Hz in the US with the right equipment. However, playing the video system on the opposite mains always had a weird flicker in the playback as the native power and playback just didn't line up.

It is similar to the effect that could be seen when using native lighting in a 50Hz mains country while recording video in NTSC. Not everyone would notice, but when you sit in an edit bay working with that footage all day, you notice everything.

Then again, some people don't notice the stuttering that is the result from 24->29.97 either. The modern 4th frame repeat drives me up the wall. </rant>

And pal snes conversion of street fighter 2 was really slow! As were lots of games. All my retro hardware is NTSC now (I live UK which was pal territory).

Though UK developers new what they were doing an optimised properly for pal. Goldeneye looks better on pal for example.

SF2 was not only slow but letterboxed and squashed down too. Unfortunately it wasnt optimised for PAL.

Australia is PAL too. I remembered waiting for this game and being so disappointed. It was $135 also which was a lot. Modern games are like $70.

No game was ever fully optimized for PAL because it is literally impossible. The only way to fix the squashed down graphics would be to completely re-scale all the art. This re-scaled art would no longer fit in the existing 8x8 tiles so you would then have to completely redo all the background and sprite mappings, you may have problems with overlapping parallax layers no longer lining up to whole tiles, and might have problems with video ram since the re-scale art now requires more memory. Basically a fully PAL optimized game would be pretty much a completely separate port built from the ground up.

But lots of games are successfully pal optimised. You are probably right, maybe it's easier to change resolution of 3d rendered games as it seems towards end of N64 is when optimisation started happening.

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