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![]() Today, there are "EverDrives" and similar devices which also appear to allow you to play NTSC games on PAL hardware, but while I'm still curious about those, my question is primarily about the old ones which could actually be bought in 1994-1995, for example to play RPGs that were never released in Europe. but maybe that's exactly how it was done? ![]() Since they sold those adapters for not much money, they can't reasonably contain the missing/different hardware found only in NTSC SNES/SFC consoles. This leads me to believe that this was simply possible and that I've been mistaken about the hardware being that different between PAL/NTSC. Not in the ads and not in the actual texts/answers by the editorial team of the magazines. They never once mentioned anything about the games not running "quite right", such as with sped-up (or slowed down) logic/music, bugs/glitches, etc. That much is not hard to understand.īut, since (if what I have understood is accurate) the PAL and NTSC machines were fundamentally different in the hardware in some important ways, how was it possible for a cheap little hardware thing to do this "conversion" which normally required the original programming team to spend significant resources to re-code and re-time the game speed/logic/physics/music to run on PAL after originally being made for Japan/USA (NTSC)? I get that it defeated any anti-piracy and region locking code. Many of the ads sold various devices which you put into the SNES cartridge slot and then put a USA game on top of, and then it would (allegedly) play on a PAL SNES, even though the game was made for American (NTSC) SNESes. "Reverse Standards Conversion", BBC Research and Development.Re-reading my old video game magazines from the mid-1990s, there's constant mentions of "USA import" games which were not released here and which "require an adapter". RSC was also used to restore the " Undertaker Sketch" from Monty Python's Flying Circus, which had been cut from the BBC's PAL master tape for being in (deliberately) bad taste. The "Inferno" DVD does not feature this comparison. It includes a split screen comparison between the source NTSC version and the final RSC processed version. The resulting DVD release of The Claws of Axos also contained a short documentary about the Reverse Standards Conversion process, presented by Jack Pizzey. Programmes recovered by this process Įarly examples of material processed for commercial re-release using RSC are the Doctor Who stories Inferno (1970) and The Claws of Axos (1971). RSC employs techniques to minimise the resultant noise - both in the separation process itself, and in preparation of the NTSC material prior to processing through use of HF linear filtering. One of the problems inherent in this is that of increased noise. ![]() RSC attempts to separate the information from the merged lines and fields of the NTSC conversion. RSC is the result of reverse engineering the method of conversion inherent in the old traditional BBC PAL to NTSC converter. Use of RSC bypasses the generation of the artefacts that would be introduced in a normal NTSC-to-PAL conversion, and actually reverses the early standards conversion method used to create the NTSC copies. RSC was developed as an alternative to double-conversion. Using interpolation processes to convert source material twice-over (in this example, PAL to NTSC to PAL) causes the artefacts previously mentioned to be exacerbated. Such double conversions produce artifacts that manifest themselves as jerkiness in the picture where movement is present, and in soft-looking pictures. This approach of interpolation results in some of the image data present in the PAL source material being merged between lines / fields of the resultant NTSC version.Īttempts to convert the NTSC version back to PAL format using traditional conversion processes yielded unsatisfactory results. Simply taking the nearest raw field would produce a peak to peak "error" of 0.83, instead of 0.33. N6 = P5 (ideal = 5, error = 0, start of next group).This gives a sequence like this (Nx = 60 Hz field x, Py = 50 Hz field y): What the original BBC converter tried to do (using the limited technology of the day) was to minimise judder by choosing either one 50 Hz field or a half-and-half mix of two 50 Hz fields, whichever was "nearer" to the temporal position of the target 60 Hz field. Traditional standards conversion techniques adopted interpolation as a way to cater for the differences between line resolution and field frequency. PAL and NTSC have a differing number of lines of resolution and also use a different field rate.
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