Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I'm in canada and I know we're 120, I was wondering if there was some reason the US was different and I'd just never heard about it. Iirc Japan, at least part of it, may actually be 110.

View on HN

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/614270/why-d...

Japan uses 100V and 50/60 Hz depending on where you are in the country.

It's really annoying as Japan has lots of wonderful vintage secondhand synthesizers for sale, but being domestic market models they often have non-switching power supplies that require 100 V.

Yup! I've got a 120->100V step down transformer for my Minidisc player.

Speaking of Japan and frequency differences, one funny indirect consequence of the power differences is the video game Super Smash Bros Melee having separate NTSC and PAL versions, one at 60Hz and another at 50Hz, and consequently running at 60fps or 50fps (unless you override this at start). For good players, 50fps changed the game a lot, so they'd always use NTSC or override to 60. But PAL Melee also had other gameplay changes.

A lot of games on the Mega Drive / Genesis didn't properly adjust their speed for PAL/NTSC, for example Sonic 1. They'd just run slower/faster according to VDP clock.

All video games and consoles had separate NTSC and PAL versions until relatively recently. PAL, which is 50Hz was/is used in Europe most of the world except a handful of countries including USA and Japan.

Japan standardized on NTSC/60Hz well before the video game era, for both the 50Hz and 60Hz mains power regions. The frequency is decoupled from mains power frequency even though it was historically based on American 60Hz power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com