Posted By
TLC
on 2023-08-05
08:59:32
|  Re: LittleSixteen V4
If a game/software is PAL/NTSC compatible, it is preferable to use it in NTSC mode ...
foot note: historically, the majority of the 264 series software "industry" happened to be based in the U.K. / Europe in general, so, most stuff is primarily PAL in practice (might run in NTSC, but the primary platform, primary testing etc., has been happening on PAL). And technically, compared to PAL, NTSC mode imposes quite a large performance penalty here. Ideally, code has to produce 60 frames per second in NTSC (vs. 50 in PAL) to keep in sync with screen refresh. Another drawback, as you said, compared to PAL, the NTSC screen has less (50 less) lines per frame than PAL, all of those missing from the upper and lower borders. This shifts the proportion of overall number of border vs. screen area lines - and adds some more performance penalty as a result, since, as we know, the CPU mostly runs at "double clock" on the borders, but not in the screen area. So, overall, whilst code has to produce more frames per second in NTSC, at the same time, it has less number of CPU cycles (less available raw CPU power) to do that. CPU intensive code that just manages to keep up with 50Hz frames in PAL, is unlikely to manage running in an every-frame schema in NTSC - which means it'd run less smoothly in NTSC. So in practice it's a bit of YMMV.
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