Metroid Prime 2 60Hz ONLY!!! in PAL land

[max-pain]

http://cube-europe.com/news.php?nid=7118

 

[evil]

Ahhh good... hopefully this is the beginning of the end of half-assed 50hz ports.

 

[Phil]

are they crazy? I'm sure there are still many outthere with tv sets that don't support 60Hz. Not to mention all the 'kids' that play their gamecubes on the old small tv in their room...

supporting 60Hz is one thing, but completely blocking out the standard (50Hz) is another..

 

[Guden Oden]

Um, maybe this is news to Nintendo, but 60Hz isn't part of the PAL standard at all. This means the game isn't PAL compliant and in violation of regulations, if such a thing exist.

There's no such thing as "half-assed 50Hz ports" by the way. All the PAL games I've played have clearly been running better in PAL than PAL60; less slowdown, greater screen resolution. This latter point isn't to be taken lightly; the difference is SUBSTANTIAL and as clear as night and day.

 

[Ug Lee]

Um, maybe this is news to Nintendo, but 60Hz isn't part of the PAL standard at all. This means the game isn't PAL compliant and in violation of regulations, if such a thing exist.

There's no such thing as "half-assed 50Hz ports" by the way. All the PAL games I've played have clearly been running better in PAL than PAL60; less slowdown, greater screen resolution. This latter point isn't to be taken lightly; the difference is SUBSTANTIAL and as clear as night and day.

I can only assume you mean PAL Gamecube games, not PAL games in general...

 

[Guden Oden]

Obviously yes, as GC is the only console to have allowed switching between 50/60Hz to any substantial degree. Most every game supports it, of the ones I got only Ikaruga lacks this feature.

 

[sir doris]

This seems true in general, PES4 on the PS2 suffers with quite a choppy frame rate in PAL60 where as PAL is much better.

 

[London Geezer]

I thought it was normal, since PAL60 has the best of both worlds, higher resolution AND 60Hz, which obviously uses up more system resources.
Usually, a decent 50Hz conversion is good enough. But it seems it's easier for devs to either not do it at all or to just put a NTSC option in there...


Funny how we're still talking about bloody 50/60Hz, when we have HDTV to worry about... :|

 

[Bohdy]

I thought it was normal, since PAL60 has the best of both worlds, higher resolution AND 60Hz

It doesn't actually. Pal60 is nearly identical to NTSC mode except for the Pal colour range.

 

[Ug Lee]

Obviously yes, as GC is the only console to have allowed switching between 50/60Hz to any substantial degree. Most every game supports it, of the ones I got only Ikaruga lacks this feature.

er, Dreamcast and Xbox didn't/aren't allowing what I would describe as less than substantial 50/60Hz switching.

 

[function]

Obviously yes, as GC is the only console to have allowed switching between 50/60Hz to any substantial degree. Most every game supports it, of the ones I got only Ikaruga lacks this feature.

er, Dreamcast and Xbox didn't/aren't allowing what I would describe as less than substantial 50/60Hz switching.

Indeed. The Dreamcast offered 50/60hz PAL switching on a great many of it's games, the big titles that didn't (like RE: Code Veronica) being noteable rareties. It was the first console to offer software 50/60hz switching, so credit to Sega there. Xbox offers 50/60hz modes on absolutely everything, far as I know, so I don't see how that would be less than a "substantial degree" of support.

With Metroid 2 I can only assume that either game speed is tied to frame rate (in which case a 50hz mode would run slow, or have to skip frames in a jerky fashion to keep up) or that the game uses 24-bit colour and z, in which case the GC won't have enough video memory to support the a full PAL resolution of 640 x 576. I'd guess the latter, but if this is the case don't see why they couldn't go with a half way compromise of something like 526.

Was kinda crappy only giving a console 2 megs of video ram in this day and age.

As long as a game is a full screen, full speed PAL conversion I'm usually happy with that (I sometimes run the Xbox at 50hz for the higher resolution), but PAL 60 is a good way to give Euro gamers the "propper" game experience if you can't be ballsed with a decent conversion.

Both require the same amount of fill rate, but other than a larger frame/z buffer PAL 50 is less demanding as it's running at a lower frame rate, and so you're less likely to suffer from slowdown or frame rate drops.

 

[[maven]]

Was kinda crappy only giving a console 2 megs of video ram in this day and age.

Just so we get the facts right:
GC has 4 meg embedded video memory, 2mb for frame- / z-buffer and 2mb for textures. It can also texture directly from main-memory (optionally using the embedded 2mb as cache or bypassing them).

 

[London Geezer]

I thought it was normal, since PAL60 has the best of both worlds, higher resolution AND 60Hz

It doesn't actually. Pal60 is nearly identical to NTSC mode except for the Pal colour range.

Oh i see, and how does the PAL colour range differ from the NTSC colour range?

 

[darkblu]

Indeed. The Dreamcast offered 50/60hz PAL switching on a great many of it's games, the big titles that didn't (like RE: Code Veronica) being noteable rareties. It was the first console to offer software 50/60hz switching, so credit to Sega there. Xbox offers 50/60hz modes on absolutely everything, far as I know, so I don't see how that would be less than a "substantial degree" of support.

does soulcalibur have a separate pal version? because the ntsc version when run on a pal dreamcast does not provide 50/60hz selection and hence plays noticeably slower (as compared to most other dc titles which have one version for both pal and ntsc and determine how to behave according to the dc they're run on)

Oh i see, and how does the PAL colour range differ from the NTSC colour range?

they use different color encoding schemes, and as a result of that their default gammas differ (IIRC). theoretically you should be able with a lot of tv set controls tweaking (on the ntsc side in particular) to get them very close but still.

 

[function]

]

Was kinda crappy only giving a console 2 megs of video ram in this day and age.

Just so we get the facts right:
GC has 4 meg embedded video memory, 2mb for frame- / z-buffer and 2mb for textures. It can also texture directly from main-memory (optionally using the embedded 2mb as cache or bypassing them).

I thought it was only 1meg for the texture cache rather than 2, but it's a whie since I looked at the specs. I don't, personally, think of a dedicated texture cache as video memory.

Regardless, my facts relevent to my point were right: 2MB isn't enough to store a 24-bit 640 x 576 back and z buffer. And I think that, in this day and age, is kinda crappy.

Maybe it's not exactly 2MBs though, and it's something odd like 2.2 megs and I'm wrong and you can fit it in. Please let me know (someone!).

Being able to fit a 32-bit back buffer and 24-bit Z at 640 x 576 would take up less than 2.5 MB's, and wouldn't seem like overkill on the memory front to me.

 

[function]

does soulcalibur have a separate pal version? because the ntsc version when run on a pal dreamcast does not provide 50/60hz selection and hence plays noticeably slower (as compared to most other dc titles which have one version for both pal and ntsc and determine how to behave according to the dc they're run on)

Yeah, Pal Soul Calibur had a 60hz option. Didn't know about most DC games having both the PAL and NTSC versions on the disk. I knew some games did (TD:LM I seem to remember), but most of the imports I played using a bootloader didn't offer the 50/60hz option like the Pal versions did.

Pal versions of the games tended to come out later. I assumed this was for localisation rather than that having already been done, and being present on the US/Japanese disks of the games too.

 

[Guden Oden]

Regardless, my facts relevent to my point were right: 2MB isn't enough to store a 24-bit 640 x 576 back and z buffer. And I think that, in this day and age, is kinda crappy.

Fortunately for us though, the Flipper engineers thought of that and blessed the little chip with about 2.25MBs of RAM, thus allowing full PAL resolution in all (non-antialiased) video modes.

 

[function]

Regardless, my facts relevent to my point were right: 2MB isn't enough to store a 24-bit 640 x 576 back and z buffer. And I think that, in this day and age, is kinda crappy.

Fortunately for us though, the Flipper engineers thought of that and blessed the little chip with about 2.25MBs of RAM, thus allowing full PAL resolution in all (non-antialiased) video modes.

Cheers. There goes what I thought to be the most likely reason for MP2 not getting a PAL 50 conversion. What else is there? Game speed tied to frame rate? Can't be bothered to redo icons for a different resolution? It includes the full SNES game and they don't want that to run slow and bordered? ........

 

[darkblu]

Yeah, Pal Soul Calibur had a 60hz option. Didn't know about most DC games having both the PAL and NTSC versions on the disk. I knew some games did (TD:LM I seem to remember), but most of the imports I played using a bootloader didn't offer the 50/60hz option like the Pal versions did.

Pal versions of the games tended to come out later. I assumed this was for localisation rather than that having already been done, and being present on the US/Japanese disks of the games too.

i believe localisation and pal/ntsc support were done sepatrately at least on some occasions. i.e. the first release of the title, be it jap or ntsc, would already have support for pal, regardless of any language localisations. here are some titles that had both pal and ntsc on the same disk off the top of my hat:

sonic adventures,
le mann (full set of localisations on the same disk),
ecco the dolphin,
power stone

can't remember if ikaruga used to have 50/60 when run on pal..
but the the jap version of powerstone (1 or 2 or both, can't recall) used to ask for 50/60 output when run on a pal dc.

 

[snacky]

The Dreamcast version of Ikaruga was only ever released in Japan, so IMO it's more than understandable for it to skip 50hz support. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of other titles like this that were only released in one territory.