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Buying a new Super Nintendo - NTSC or PAL?

carl_rogerscarl_rogers Registered User regular
edited July 2014 in Help / Advice Forum
My SNES died and I'm planning on buying a new one off Ebay. After doing some research, im a little confused as there seems to be discrepancies in opinions on whether the games run better (faster) on NTSC or PAL.
i.e. Zelda ATTP seems to run faster on NTSC, while Super Mario Kart runs considerably slower on NTSC. Star Wing runs about the same across both versions.
My current games are PAL version, and I dont have any issue with them. But if im going to be buying a new system and games, id rather buy the better version.
Has anyone had experience playing both NTSC and PAL version SNES games? NTSC is cheaper, and there seems to be more selection on Ebay. PAL seems to be a little more expensive and rare.

carl_rogers on

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    MrTLiciousMrTLicious Registered User regular
    Unless you want to rebuild your library or mess with modding/converters, you should probably just buy whatever you already had. Assuming of course you want to keep using your current games. If you're looking to expand a lot, relative to what you have, I'd probably go with NTSC for the reasons you mentioned (mainly bigger selection). Just be careful about region locks.

    I've never noticed any kind of lag or framerate issues on a SNES (including NTSC Mario Kart), so I'm not sure how much performance is really a relevant decision point.

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    nexuscrawlernexuscrawler Registered User regular
    Where are you in the world? Is the TV set you're using from a PAL or NTSC region? It may seem like it doesn't matter anymore but it does. Lots of HDTVs don't have pal or NTSC equivalent frame rates depending on where they're from. So the speed differences you're seeing are probably the result of some interpolation by the set.

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    carl_rogerscarl_rogers Registered User regular
    Thanks for the thoughts folks.

    @nexus - Im in Australia. back in the day our tvs could run both ntsc and pal signals. Im not sure how it is with our HD tvs.
    I have AV cables from my Nintendo 64 which I used with my old super nes.

    @mrTlicious - sorry that was a typo. Supe MK runs horrible on Pal.

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