At the time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay-especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners.
That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. (These games also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind, so they were squished to fit on PAL displays.) Mario aus papier gemachtįurther Reading N64 on Switch: Reading the tea leaves on future game prospectsSure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. This meant both slower gameplay than what was originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. Instead, internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. In order to port the games to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards.
If you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference is noticeable yet mild. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while the PAL sets that dominated Europe had a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific-and era-specific-tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on the Switch: an option to swap between the PAL and NTSC video standards.