The resolution of PAL but with the color sub-carrier of NTSC. Your experience was probably quite a bit different than most. On one hand, it might have looked better in some ways but it's likely the range variance of quality across consumer gear was far wider because the market was smaller, so there were fewer standard reference designs and components made to support it. Fortunately, we didn't have to worry about PAL-N on the production equipment side because South American broadcasters produced their content in PAL format and converted to PAL-N at the transmitter. Transcoding PAL to NTSC was hard to do well and even though PAL-N is sort-of half the problem, IIRC, it still wasn't a transparent conversion. Since PAL-N was effectively an over-the-air standard viewable only on TVs made for those regions, I have no idea what it even looked like to home viewers.
If there was ever a technology which somehow, against all odds, came into existence decades ahead of its time, it would be analog television. Once you understand how the system actually works... the fact it worked at all in the late 1930s, much less as well as it did seems impossible. It required brilliantly innovative engineering as well as some incredibly elegant hacks and more than a few ugly compromises (the ghosts of which still haunt today's HDTV standards).
Then politicians got involved and made this stunning yet impossibly complex, barely working new technology - far worse by splitting it into three different incompatible standards (NTSC, PAL, SECAM). None of them worked with the others and they each spawned their own bizarre variants (NTSC-J, PAL 60, PAL-N, and PALs B, D, G, H, I and K). Broadcast television was both a glorious testament to mankind's ingenuity and our ability to fuck up a good thing for dumb reasons. A tradition that lives on in today's digital television with its truly breathtaking resolution, color depth and fidelity yet ugly artifacts from over-compression, broken DRM and incompatible proprietary tone-mapping standards. :-)