The new PlayStation Plus membership system has been launched, and the issue of paying for the upgrade fee has not stopped. Now it is reported that the PS classic games provided by the new service provide PAL format files in Taiwan, resulting in poor game operation and provoking again.
Currently known to be affected are mainly PlayStation first-party classic games, including “Ape Escape”, “Wild Arms”, “National Golf”, and some third-party games are slightly affected.
In the past when it was still picture tube TV, games had differences between PAL and NTSC. The United States, Japan, and Taiwan mainly use the NTSC format, while Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and most Asian countries use PAL. But Japan, which also used NTSC before, this time gave the classic games of NTSC specifications.
The biggest difference between PAL and NTSC is that PAL is 50Hz/25fps, NTSC is 60Hz/30fps. Therefore, the “European version” and “American version” games in the past are actually different. Usually, PAL runs on PAL TV, and NTSC is the same; if they do not match, the picture will not be displayed smoothly.
Some players on the Internet used the state of the PS classic game (50Hz PAL) running on the NTSC TV (left) and the state of the PAL TV (right) to compare different smoothness.
Looks like PS1 classics are using 50hz PAL versions instead of NTSC. NTSC PS1 feels much smoother than emulated version. ???????????? pic.twitter.com/5q3kRn353h
— The_Marmolade (@the_marmolade) May 23, 2022
Take this for example. The new PS Plus provides PAL versions of PS classic games in Taiwan, but when simulated with NTSC, the screen will have a subtle stun. Taiwan is one of the cases where the NTSC area is used. Whether other countries using the NTSC area have encountered similar problems will have to wait for players from various countries to report back.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. The PlayStation Classic retro mini-game console launched by Sony in 2018 was also found to have unified PAL specifications, so some NTSC markets must still use PAL to play. Taking this incident, it seems that Sony has used the same set of software before it will happen again.