If you’re a subscriber to the new PS Plus Deluxe tier, you’d have access to a small number of classic PlayStation titles from the PS1 and PSP days. Though for the former, some of you may have experienced a less-than-optimal experience, to put things mildly. For what it’s worth, Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced that it’s planning to roll out a fix, in a sense. Which is to put in NTSC options for the affected games.
If you’re unfamiliar with the problem, it is basically down to the old analogue NTSC and PAL colour encoding system in the early days of colour TV. While NTSC worked for places like the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea, to name a few, other areas, most notably Europe, had to use PAL. This is because issues with NTSC like colour tone shifting in poor transmission conditions were exacerbated by the local geography and weather. But while NTSC ran at 60Hz, PAL had a frequency of 50Hz instead as a tradeoff.
We’re planning to roll out NTSC options for a majority of classic games offered on the PlayStation Plus Premium and Deluxe plan in Asia, Europe, Middle East, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand regions. More PlayStation Plus info: https://t.co/E7JKtdM2WM pic.twitter.com/YfMMoqv9xN
— PlayStation Asia (@PlayStationAsia) June 23, 2022
Today, when most forms of media is digital, the NTSC and PAL formats are largely obsolete. But because the classic games accessible via the PS Plus Deluxe subscription are region-accurate, markets that traditionally got the PAL versions were stuck with that. Worse, some markets like Taiwan, which traditionally used NTSC as well, were also stuck with PAL versions of games.
And it doesn’t take much to imagine why a 50Hz format would be less than optimal in a medium where 60fps is now the standard. According to VGC, SIE has a patch to bump these PAL titles up to 60Hz, but these sometimes result in ghosting effects.
The better fix, as mentioned, is to give subscribers NTSC versions of these games instead. But while the company has announced that it’s “planning” to roll this out, no date has been provided as to when this will happen.
(Source: PlayStation Asia / Twitter, VGC)
