Fans Outraged At Nintendo For 50Hz Wii U Virtual Console Ports

January 29, 2013 - 10:06am

Wii U players are outraged that the first Virtual Console title, Balloon Fight, runs at 50Hz frequency despite the existence of 60Hz versions.

Before the transition to digital TV, PAL was the standard used for analog TV broadcast in Europe and Japan while NTSC was used in North America. One of the main differences between the two standards is that PAL operates at 50Hz while NTSC operates at 60Hz. This difference in frame rates makes PAL games run 17% slower than NTSC when played on modern digital TVs.

Currently, Balloon Fight Miiverse is filled with angry messages criticizing Nintendo for porting the European PAL version of the game instead of the North American version which runs at 60Hz. Fans have already started a petition asking Nintendo to make sure all future Virtual Console titles are ported from 60Hz versions.

Comments

USA LOSER LAND

List by the World Bank European Union 17,552,216 United States 15,094,000 The economy of the European Union generates a GDP of over €12.629 trillion (US$17.578 trillion in 2011) according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), making it the largest economy in the world. The European Union (EU) economy consists of a Internal Market and the EU is represented as a unified entity in the World Trade Organization (WTO). EU IS RICHER THAN NORTH AMERICA WE ARE BOSS AND NOT MR LOSER 50hz !!

50 hertz

It don't matter what hertz these chineese developers use, you knuckle heads bought a Nintendo WII U. That's your greatest mistake right there. Inferior graphics weak hardware lack of games, this should be the talk of teh day not the fact it's shitty childish games lack a few extra frames. The games suck so it really doesn't matter. Hell the games are so suckish, I'm sure they would run at blazing speeds even if nintendo choose to use 30 hertz. This console is a junky plastic toy looking console only meant for children under the age of 12. Those little nutty kid's wouldn't have a clue there games were being dumbed down. Xbox360 woOt 60 frames a second

Japan used NTSC

Check your facts. Japan used NTSC (NTSC-J to be precise), compatible with America. It was their European, Australia, etc. models built for PAL, and usually significantly later. There are a couple implications of the PAL variants - potentially more bug fixes, and potentially multi language support.

No, bitching because games

No, bitching because games are released in a barely noticeably different video standard while there are literal atrocities that need urgent attention in your own back yard that >nobody is fucking doing anything about< is why people hate 'you' Americans.

Umm

The PAL version has always been later in the development and release than NTSC. The PAL version, therefor, has less bugs and is their 'final edition' in a sense. I cannot fault Nintendo for using their final editions for the Virtual Console...? Sure, 60hz would be nice, but I'd rather a game without flaws and glitches. Having said that, would not be hard to include both PAL and NTSC in the downloaded package, allowing players to choose in options somewhere!

On the contrary, putting a

On the contrary, putting a carefully-designed and programmed game through the 50hz blender often left it without untested and unfixed side-effects. In some PAL copies of Link to the Past on SNES, for example, it's literally impossible to get an item in the last dungeon because they forgot to alter the timing for the bombs. And this is a rigidly-tested AAA Nintendo game we're talking about here.

lol

Really? A game with flaws and glitches? Those were extremely few and scarse back in the day, you don't have to worry about those when talking about old school games final version or not.

No they weren't. You never

No they weren't. You never played the first Pokèmon games? They were so buggy that they spawned urban legends around their glitches. Zelda OOT too. The development and memory restrictions meant developers had much less freedom and control over the quality of their end product.

Bullshit. Games back then

Bullshit. Games back then needed MORE quality control as there was generally only one chance to get it right. ----- Cartridge based games were much less buggy and glitchy compared to games released today. Even some of the first gen CD based games were the same. ------ The main reason for this is that the internet wasn't as freely available to people back then. Unless you were a PC owner, you couldn't rely on whatever monthly PC gaming magazine there was to get patches from their cover discs. -------- Today, because the internet is so widely available, games companies are just shoveling out games with some serious game crippling bugs. They've all adopted the attitude of release it now and fix it later. ----- Games companies would do well to look back at those days of cartridge and first gen CD consoles to see how a game should be released.

Just because they needed it,

Just because they needed it, it doesn't mean they got it - publishers were just as lazy and pushy as they are now. Sorry to shatter your rise-tinted illusion here, games were still far less than perfect on release twenty years ago.

Nothing pisses me off more

Nothing pisses me off more than some asshole pretending to know something which he clearly knows nothing about, at least i hope you're pretending for your sake ;), a programmer in this day and age who uses refresh rate as a source of fixed timing is a fucking retard. If you have programmed for less then a year i might let it slide.. but that doesn't excuse you from making shit up.

Well then looking at the

Well then looking at the mirror must piss you off a lot. So lets start, first the only one pretending to know something here is you, my comment was actually based on the ignorance displayed by the OP, yours on the other hand simply assumes I know nothing about programming without any sort of evidence. Second, We're talking about games made two decades ago, don't even bring modern programming techniques into the subject unless you want to sound like an idiot, oh wait... Also I like how you refer to programming as general thing ("If you have programmed for less then a year i might let it slide") as if it doesnt differ from target platform to target platform. Anyway, you wanna talk about algorithms, I'm game, maybe dijkstra to start off easy?

"Modern" programming

"Modern" programming techniques? You mean the concepts pioneered in the 60's? THOSE "modern" techniques? And quoting a random (and incredibly unrelated to the subject) algorithm from Wikipedia's "List of Algorithms" index doesn't give you some kind of over handed superiority - it makes you a dick that would rather insult people to inflate your own ego than engage in some kind of educational discussion. BTW, I bet you can't even comprehend the concept behind procedural L-systems relating to real-world organic simulation (that one's NOT from Wikipedia ;)

It actually is from wikipedia

It actually is from wikipedia, you just reworded "model the growth processes of plant development" to "real-world organic simulation". I like how you point out things from wikipedia right away and end up doing it yourself, one weakness people have is that they always think others do the same bad things they do. I'm sorry, I don't need google, wikipedia or any other source to talk about subjects I learned while majoring in CS. I picked dijkstra because its fairly common and enough to prove one knows how to program as opposed to a niche algorithm like L-System which most programmers around the world don't know of, that goes to show just how much of a kid you are. Ripping content you perceive as complex from wikipedia just to try and make it seem like you know what you're talking about while trying to hide the fact that you didn't address my previous points at all. I also like how you failed to list any of the techniques pioneered in the 60's. As for not engaging in an educative discussion, I gave you the opening to talk about dijkstra in depth, beyond what wikipedia has but instead you chose to shift the focus to another algorithm. Possibly because you'd have no idea what dijktra's algorithm is or what it is good for without wikipedia and probably never implemented it yourself.

1. You're clearly a fucking

1. You're clearly a fucking retard; 2. Dijkstras' algorithm was published in 1959 - THOSE techniques; 3. No CS class worth attending would mention it as anything other than historical context because it's a slow, inefficient and outdated path finding algorithm that has little to no application in modern computing.

News flash: CS only sounds

News flash: CS only sounds good on your cv, in reality without any additional effort you end up looking retarded on the net. Dijkstras proves shit, i didn't know what it was until i looked it up just now and you know what? i already knew everything about it, because programming isn't about learning a few "algorithms" in class, it's about being creative and having some common sense. You will never grow beyond your text books if you think it's enough. Then again maybe you only care about getting your unearned massive paycheck each month.

Great job ripping off my

Great job ripping off my argument in a terribly vein attempt to turn it against me - nice creativity there, you flaming retard :/ Given the language you're using I highly doubt you've graduated middle school let alone "majored in CS" (You mean Counter strike, right? There's no way they'd let you into a Computer Science course). An no, it's NOT from Wikipedia, it's from a paper I did in first year 0_o Those two sentences don't even mean the same thing! The part I like most? You ACTUALLY HAD TO LOOK IT UP ON WIKIPEDIA BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T KNOW WHAT IT WAS. And You're making up what you think you did in your other post - you only mentioned the name "dijkstra" (Which yes, you have CLEARLY ripped from Wikipedia) without any context or discussion just because you thought it would make you sound smart. Tell me, if you have all the answers, tell me just exactly how it relates to the 50hz speed discrepancy? Talk about "Ripping content you perceive as complex from wikipedia just to try and make it seem like you know what you're talking about while trying to hide the fact that you didn't address my previous points at all". BTW, I chose L-Systems because they're incredibly simple, yet too complex for your obviously stinted intellect to understand, just to prove you knew fucking nothing at all. And it worked :D So, are you going to contribute to the discussion, or are you just going to look like a complete douchebag trying to sound superior to people who are clearly more educated than you by finding big words from the internet and insulting people's (clearly intimidating to you) intellects? Because if you're not, nobody give a shit about you and you're just wanking your ego to a crowd that's laughing at how pathetic you are (intellectually and as a person).

I actually think it's a valid

I actually think it's a valid question - why didn't these early consoles have a draw speed independent of their output display? PC's have forever - as do all modern consoles. Was output buffering too operationally expensive for early consoles or something?

TV Bottleneck

I guess simplest way to put it is because PAL TV's run at 50Hz it limits the games played on them to to a lower amount of frames per second (which makes the game play slower) when compared to NTSC TV's that run at 60Hz, which the additional 10Hz allows the games to achieve a 17% increase in frames per second.

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