PAL and NTSC timing
9 years ago
Cambridgeshire, England

I've been wondering if there's some kind of calculation that could be used to get a rough estimate of what a PAL time could be if it was played on NTSC, and vice versa.

I was thinking for PAL to NTSC, it'd be: time/6¤5 And then NTSC to PAL: time/5¤6 In that way it'd be looking at the other region's framerate and making it the timed region's (for PAL to NTSC, it's be like dividing 30fps for NTSC by 6 to get 5fps then multiply by 5 to get 25fps for PAL).

I tested the calculations out between my PAL and NTSC PBs for HP2PS1 100%, where the in-game time differences help consider what I'm aiming for, as my PAL PB is 30 seconds ahead of NTSC according to the game's file timer. If I tied the in-game time of my PAL PB with my NTSC PB, my NTSC PB in RTA would be 2:37:50, or my PAL PB would be 3:00:13. When doing my PAL to NTSC conversion, I should have seen 2:37:50, but my calculations got 2:36:09. Considering my PAL's use of FDS with NTSC on emu, as well as lag on console, that's not actually far off. Whereas my NTSC to PAL conversion was a lot further off: should have seen 3:00:13, actually got 3:07:28.

I realise it's dumb to try to compare PAL and NTSC this way, as there's no easy way to know if it's accurate, but it's worth a shot if it's almost accurate at least.