Rescue on Fractalus NTSC vs PAL

[Heaven/TQA]

as Lucasfilm Ltd. are/were professionals but I am still wonder if they adapted the games properly to PAL/NTSC?

[Rybags]

Unknown. Probably easy enough to find out, just find any reference to the PAL reg in ANTIC and see what it does.

 

I haven't played it in some time, but I think the game engine just updated events in real-time and the rendering part did what it could to keep up (ie - framerate varies but events don't slow down/speed up).

[www.atarimania.com]

Probably easy to compare both releases: http://www.atarimania.com/vapi.php?MENU=8&RUB=VAPI

 

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Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[Gunstar]

Well it was definately programmed for NTSC to start with, so no adaption was necessary. I would think that due to the NTSC/PAL clock speed differences and 60 to 50hz screen refresh differences that the game must run considerably slower on a PAL machine though...not a good thing at all, especially for a "3D" game that needs all the speed it can get! In an interview with Lucasfilm programmers they said they were glad to be programming on an Atari becuase it was so much faster than C64's and Apple II's of the day.

[Heaven/TQA]

gunstar, that's exactly what i am interested in...as they kept an eye on on that...

[Tickled_Pink]

Well it was definately programmed for NTSC to start with, so no adaption was necessary. I would think that due to the NTSC/PAL clock speed differences and 60 to 50hz screen refresh differences that the game must run considerably slower on a PAL machine though...not a good thing at all, especially for a "3D" game that needs all the speed it can get! In an interview with Lucasfilm programmers they said they were glad to be programming on an Atari becuase it was so much faster than C64's and Apple II's of the day.

I somehow doubt that there would be any noticeable speed difference. The PAL version plays well and keeps a good speed up. For some reason, both the cart and disk versions are slower than the tape. The tape version seems to have been tweaked to start at a faster level.

 

The "3D" behind it probably isn't that complex - as Jeff Minter said in one interview, they must have cheated like hell to get it to be as fast and smooth as it is.

[drac030]

I would think that due to the NTSC/PAL clock speed differences and 60 to 50hz screen refresh differences that the game must run considerably slower on a PAL machine

 

The PAL machines have CPU slower by approx. 1 percent, but the VBL rate is simultaneously about 17 percent lower - so I'd expect that a PAL Atari is effectively faster than the NTSC one.

[ijor]

I don't know about the 3D rendering, but it is obvious that the music is refresh rate specific.

 

The Epyx/US release sounds slower (as expected) on PAL systems. And the Activision/Euro release sounds faster on NTSC computers. The Euro version on PAL sounds (correctly) the same as the US version on NTSC.

 

So it was correctly "adapted" to PAL. No idea if the adaptation was originally done by Lucasfilm (probably not), or later in Europe.

[Allas]

PAL have 50 VBI per second and more cycles per single VBI. You can add more code in a VBI in PAL system. That an advantage.

 

In other way, the 6502 CPU is more fast in NTSC system, so the main code runs more quickly.

 

Because, the main factor of the game speed is the main code, then usually the games works faster in NTSC version. But, you can do aditional things in PAL version.

 

Am i wrong?

[www.atarimania.com]

The Epyx/US release sounds slower (as expected) on PAL systems. And the Activision/Euro release sounds faster on NTSC computers. The Euro version on PAL sounds (correctly) the same as the US version on NTSC. So it was correctly "adapted" to PAL. No idea if the adaptation was originally done by Lucasfilm (probably not), or later in Europe.

It seems the NTSC and PAL versions of Ballblazer are different as well...

 

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Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[ijor]

Because, the main factor of the game speed is the main code, then usually the games works faster in NTSC version.

 

The reason that most games run slower on PAL has nothing to do with the CPU clock. The clock difference is probably not significant on most cases. The reason is that most games sync the sound and animation to the frame rate.