Question about Tetris orginal NES

Thread in 'Discussion' started by kezedy, 22 Jul 2018.

  1. Hello we are quite newbie to this, but Ill fire some questions..hopefully you forgive me if this is the wrong place to post it:

    We have a european NES here, and we have made it region free with the disabling the chip..
    The NES seems like working like a charm. We live in Norway so we hooked the NES up to a Samsung telly bought here in scandinavia.
    We have looked a little on this guys playing teris in USA, so we wanted to try to compete with the same specs. as they do. As I understand the NTCS version is much slower to play on than the PAL edition.
    I have now bought the NTCS version of the game, and as I said before made the NES region free, and also hooked it up to the Telly.
    This works well, but are we playing than on the same speed as they do in the USA?
    We think that level 19 as start is impossible.. we cant even move them to correct side, when the board is empty.. Is it our television that are causing this? I cant change any settings on it to PAL or NTCS.. ? It has EXT plug but it is a LCD TV..
    Do we have to setup a CRT TV to make the speed correct? (With NTCS) Is this the problem?
    So even if we play the game from USA on the region free box... will the game still be in PAL??
    I am quite unsure of this, would be really happy to get a solution, good answer of this..

    Best regards
    Kevin
     
  2. Unfortunately no. The PAL NES runs slower than the NTSC NES; the PAL NES always runs games at 50 frames per second, as opposed to NTSC's 60 frames per second. So, playing NTSC Tetris in a PAL NES is like playing at 80% speed.

    NTSC Tetris and PAL Tetris are slightly different games. Unlike most other NES games where the software was unchanged for the European release (and as such play at 80% speed compared to the American/Japanese releases), the version of Tetris released in Europe has adjusted physics so the overall speed would be "similar" to the original American release. A lot of things are faster in PAL Tetris because all of the timings were put through a formula and rounded down to the nearest frame. This rounding down has some scary results (PAL Level 16-18 gravity ≈ NTSC Level 19-28 gravity, and PAL Level 19+ gravity ≈ NTSC Level 29+ gravity) but also some beneficial ones (piece movement is noticeably faster). You'll need to adjust to the difference in game flow when switching from one version to the other.

    Due to the difference in piece physics between the two games, its a bit more important to keep momentum preserved in the NTSC version if you want to survive under high gravity:
    In NTSC Tetris, Delayed AutoShift (DAS) start-up is 16 frames (~266ms @ 60fps) and moves the piece every 6th frame (10Hz @ 60fps).
    In PAL Tetris, DAS start-up is only 12 frames (240ms @ 50fps) and moves the piece every 4th frame (12.5Hz @ 50fps).

    The TV won't affect game speed, it just displays whatever picture is sent from the NES. (There will be less visual latency / input delay if you play NES on a CRT rather than an LCD, but that is a different discussion.)

    Yes, the only way to play the game at the correct 60fps would be to use a NTSC NES. There is no straightforward setting or adjustment to make a PAL NES play games at the NTSC framerate.
     
  3. To put it more plainly, you need an NTSC NES to play at the correct speed.
    Unless your TV is very old (like 80s), it'll very likely work with both PAL and NTSC consoles.

    You are still playing the correct game, though, and level 19 is absolutely possible. It's just very hard.

    IMO, if you are into NES at all, you need an NTSC console for most games. Not just Tetris.
     
    Kitaru likes this.

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