My weird cartridge
5 years ago
Belfast, Northern Ireland

I play on the super mario bros./duck hunt cartridge (PAL version) and I noticed that the music on the cartridge was alot faster than it is meant to be. I don't think this affects the gameplay, just the music. Does this happen to anyone else? And would it disqualify me from speedrunning?

iplaymario124 likes this
Colorado, USA

Here's some information about the PAL version vs. NTSC.

  • Runs at 50 FPS instead of 60 FPS (meaning PAL is slower)
  • Mario's physics are a bit different
  • Music tempo is different
  • Playing on the PAL version is permitted and we do have some players that do play on that version. Just be aware that it is slower, so you're not going to get the kind of times that the NTSC players can. If you submit runs, make sure you mark them for EU / PAL when you pick the region.
Lul_ecks_dee, Nocapturecard and 7 others like this
Oklahoma, USA

To add to what Roopert said @Nocapturecard "I don't think this affects the gameplay"

It does affect gameplay - some of the jumps are different because you jump different distances between NTSC and PAL - you also move significantly farther forward on the screen after backwards jumps (for example, you can easily do 4-2 wrong warp with only 2 backwards jumps instead of 3)

As another example of the difference, the stair jump with Lakatu at the beginning of 8-2 is literally impossible on PAL at full speed (as opposed to NTSC where it's fairly easy) - so you have to slow down a little to successfully get up the stairs

67 out of the 683 runs on this leaderboard are PAL. And for reference of speed, the NTSC version world record is from Kosmic and is 4:56 - the PAL world record is tied by Miqoou and JoshKeys at 5:11 --- so it's significantly slower.

In short - it's faster to play on NTSC if it's available, but the PAL works just fine, but is a little slower and a little different.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Lul_ecks_dee, Nocapturecard and 2 others like this
Oklahoma, USA

Video of the tied world record for PAL - you can see he makes a two framerule mistake on 4-2... and at LEAST a one second mistake on 8-4 between a long turnaround room and a big mistake on water... World record (without even BBG / blazit) is wide open by probably a full 2 seconds, but certainly an easy one second... O.O

Just a thought. (wink wink Kosmic, next time you get the itch to do a meme category)

It's not a very sexy category though because it doesn't get its own board - the only way to see it is to go to the main leaderboard and click on "FILTER" then "REGION" and select "EUR / PAL"

Edited by the author 5 years ago
Nocapturecard, darG and 2 others like this
United States

The gameplay is a little bit different, so just select PAL when you are submitting.

But somewes has WR

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