Have you ever played a game in black and white due to PAL or NTSC incompatibility?

[norunove]

This is kinda of a funny story to me and since i have been thinking about this quite a lot lately it came to my mind: "Have anyone else went through this too?"
I remember being a kid and being on the living room playing on my PS2, i had a copy of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and being a kid i would never know the source of the problem, anyways, someday i gathered up the courage and picked up my trusty English dictionary (The poor thing was in shambles LOL) and finally finished the game from beginning to end without understand most of what is happening and also with only black and white colors.
Anyone else had that kind of experience?

 

[Waffles]

Yes! I played almost every PS1 game I owned in black and white for a while due to the only TV available to me at the time being an old, wooden box which was incompatible with it XD

 

[norunove]

Yes! I played almost every PS1 game I owned in black and white for a while due to the only TV available to me at the time being an old, wooden box which was incompatible with it XD

No way that happened to you too! LOL
The funny thing is, this was the only game i had to ever do that, i had the cursed copy of Prince of Persia

 

[VampireLord1024]

Never played any games from the PAL region.

 

[DunkeyKong]

The only one I've played in black and white is probably a Gameboy games, not due to incompatibility that is

 

[Cu-Neo]

Kinda. I have a friend that had a Wii with a PAL iso of Iron Man 2 he showed me that the game was in black and white. At that time we didn't know why, we were kids with no understanding of technology we simply wanted to play Iron Man 2 on the Wii. And another time this happened to me was also in the Wii but this time with a PAL gamecube iso of RE 2. In my gramps house I have two old TV's, in one the game was in black and white and in the other was in color. What a funny situation.

 

[norunove]

The only one I've played in black and white is probably a Gameboy games, not due to incompatibility that is

I guess that counts too LOL

 

[Leifang]

I had to buy a new TV for PS2, since old one didn't run it color on 60Hz mode (so games like Tekken 5 worked were in black and white and 4 had to be slowed down), but this seems to be a bug exclusive to PlayStation 2, since both Famiclones and PS1 absolutely ran 60Hz games just fine on old TV, with full color and speed, I learned to tell apart はい hai and いいえ iie thanks to Chase the Express, and Famicom muticarts were full of Famicom exclusives and hacks that never release in the West.

Color didn't depend on game version on older consoles, but on your TV and connection, I played on several old television boxes that only ran games in B&W, but had color one at home... until I got a PS2. Video players also had PAL/SECAM switch, some tapes needed to mash that until it looked normally (movie framerate is always 24FPS).

On PSX, Eastern European market was chaotic, we had European versions of Tomb Raiders (correct aspect ratio, 30FPS) except 1 IIRC, and Japanese import fighters for full framerate and no censorship, BUT things like Crash would be from US, then Gran Turismo 2 had Japanese flyers in tuning mode, 100x multiplied prices (credits were rough equivalent to yen not dollars) and km/h, BUT GT1 had English text in tuning blurbs, but used moon units like mph elsewhere... There's a patch online that fixes the American version.

Later I learned PAL versions of many of these games had botched framerate (some native Euro games like TR2-5 ran on 30FPS, but there was no need to make a RACING game 25 – you don't divide refresh rate for 2 to get desired gramerate, that's not how it works). And others were squished, but this didn't apply to most stuff made by European devs, like Rare with their Donkey Kong Country or Core.

But whoever imported games knew which versions were good, and you could easily check on PS1 intro screen (it said Sony Computer Entertainment America/Europe/Japan), and all three sets worked on all TVs, so it seems that PS2 had exclusive some bug that sent the wrong signal to TV in 60Hz mode... I heard it wrongly sent NTSC signal instead of 60Hz PAL but then what of older consoles having NTSC games working perfectly?

 

[norunove]

I had to buy a new TV for PS2, since old one didn't run it color on 60Hz mode (so games like Tekken 5 worked were in black and white and 4 had to be slowed down), but this seems to be a bug exclusive to PlayStation 2, since both Famiclones and PS1 absolutely ran 60Hz games just fine on old TV, with full color and speed, I learned to tell apart はい hai and いいえ iie thanks to Chase the Express, and Famicom muticarts were full of Famicom exclusives and hacks that never release in the West.

Color didn't depend on game version on older consoles, but on your TV and connection, I played on several old television boxes that only ran games in B&W, but had color one at home... until I got a PS2. Video players also had PAL/SECAM switch, some tapes needed to mash that until it looked normally (movie framerate is always 24FPS).

On PSX, Eastern European market was chaotic, we had European versions of Tomb Raiders (correct aspect ratio, 30FPS) except 1 IIRC, and Japanese import fighters for full framerate and no censorship, BUT things like Crash would be from US, then Gran Turismo 2 had Japanese flyers in tuning mode, 100x multiplied prices (credits were rough equivalent to yen not dollars) and km/h, BUT GT1 had English text in tuning blurbs, but used moon units like mph elsewhere... There's a patch online that fixes the American version.

Later I learned PAL versions of many of these games had botched framerate (some native Euro games like TR2-5 ran on 30FPS, but there was no need to make a RACING game 25 – you don't divide refresh rate for 2 to get desired gramerate, that's not how it works). And others were squished, but this didn't apply to most stuff made by European devs, like Rare with their Donkey Kong Country or Core.

But whoever imported games knew which versions were good, and you could easily check on PS1 intro screen (it said Sony Computer Entertainment America/Europe/Japan), and all three sets worked on all TVs, so it seems that PS2 had exclusive some bug that sent the wrong signal to TV in 60Hz mode... I heard it wrongly sent NTSC signal instead of 60Hz PAL but then what of older consoles having NTSC games working perfectly?

Holy shit, that is super awesome, never thought that something like that would be happening, back then we had a 31 inch Philips TV probably some Europe import and most of my games were NTSC i believe, that must have been what it cause the thing to display the colors that way

 

[Leifang]

Holy shit, that is super awesome, never thought that something like that would be happening, back then we had a 31 inch Philips TV probably some Europe import and most of my games were NTSC i believe, that must have been what it cause the thing to display the colors that way

We had these yellow Famicom clone carts... They missed some of more complex NES games like later Marios or Zeldas (anything where you could save, basically) but had some Japanese exclusives and Taiwanese bootlegs, like the backports of SNES Aladdin or Donkey Kong.

On 16-bit generation we lost majorly with SEGA Mega Drive being the only option. Like, the Final Fantasy Europe got was 7.

Many consoles here were sold already "chipped," so they didn't have region restrictions, and also let you run CD-Rs and stuff, most PS2 stuff I played was on burned DVD blanks!

I still have a stack somewhere, a salesman was cleaning store and let me get the entire thing for like 30 hryvnias... which was 5 bucks back then? Right before economic collapse of 2008.

 

[norunove]

We had these yellow Famicom clone carts... They missed some of more complex NES games like later Marios or Zeldas (anything where you could save, basically) but had some Japanese exclusives and Taiwanese bootlegs, like the backports of SNES Aladdin or Donkey Kong.

On 16-bit generation we lost majorly with SEGA Mega Drive being the only option. Like, the Final Fantasy Europe got was 7.

Many consoles here were sold already "chipped," so they didn't have region restrictions, and also let you run CD-Rs and stuff, most PS2 stuff I played was on burned DVD blanks!

I still have a stack somewhere, a salesman was cleaning store and let me get the entire thing for like 30 hryvnias... which was 5 bucks back then? Right before economic collapse of 2008.

I've seen some of those yellow cartridges around here in brazil too on some famiclones, specially on master system clones, my PS2 was also chipped from the start here was very common using piracy since most games were way too expensive for anyone to buy original, PS2 was very popular even some years back around here because the easy of access to games, burning DVD's and all, i remember buy 3 Burned games for 10 bucks as a kid lol

 

[SkunkyBeaumont]

There were still black and white sets floating around when I was a child (I'm old.). We didn't get cable til like 1993 where I lived, in the literal middle of the woods at that point. I played a lot of NES in b&w. Watched the Karate Kid so many times the cassette broke. My little sister did the same with Disney's Little mermaid.

 

[dropsmegamega]

On my old tv any pal game would make the image go nuts so it was unplayable

 

[RyougiShiki66]

Yes. I had an Old Sony WEGA 21inch CRT TV (PAL Region) that I used to play my mod-chipped PS2 on. Any game that wasn't PAL Region was always black and white (like 90% of my Bootleg PS2 Copy Game Collection LOL).

The most vivid one I remember is playing the NTSC version of Castlevania: Lament of Innocence , and getting very far (Like 60%) on it despite completely Black and White Output.

It's one of those things where it truly makes me appreciate HDMI Connectors becoming a standard.

 

[Patapolis]

i had that problem with NTSC compatibility when i first got Disgaea 3: absence of justice. this also
applied to wild arms 4.

 

[RetroLaw]

Not with a game but with a japanese vhs with the Street Fighter movie (the anime one) and a Fatal Fury movie.

 

[SkunkyBeaumont]

Not with a game but with a japanese vhs with the Street Fighter movie (the anime one) and a Fatal Fury movie.

 

[Varyag]

Yes, my pirated copy of Gran Turismo 4 that I bought off a stand on the street on release week, was a PAL copy and my systems were NTSC. It ran either in black and white, or with the help of a cheat disk (like an Action Replay or Gameshark) that forced the next game to load in NTSC, it would run in color BUT with the screen in the wrong size, clipping the edges of the screen out of my TV.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

As a kid I was wondering why that copy of crash bandicoot one the moroccan street vendor gave me was always in black and white, turns out it was the better version

 

[PhrawzT]

I started with an Atari 2600 on a black & white TV.

I have also played the PAL version of We Love Katamari on my NTSC PS2 and it was in black and white and flickering. I did manage to replace it with an NTSC version eventually.

 

[Ikagura]

I'm a big noob but is it because of the wavelength?

 

[SkunkyBeaumont]

The signals handle color differently as well as being different resolutions and frame rates.
A lot of old Pal games didn't correct for this when localized, although a quick jaunt through the code would have fixed it up.
Also, Elite for the NES needs to be in pal, cause it can't run at 60 hertz.

 

[Cheela]

I am glad to learn that i wasn't the only one to have this struggle as a kid. I remember playing Spartan: Total Warrior for the PS2 and having to choose between playing in Spanish in black and white in my pirated pal copy or playing at full color in English on the pirated ntsc copy. (Chile used NTSC)

Building character exercise to be honest, now i play most things in English because of that :3

 

[VeeK?]

There was a time when I had a TV that only worked in PAL, so any NTSC game would at first be just displayed in black and white, but as time went on (within 5-ish minutes, I think), the image would start jumping progressively faster and faster, making it unplayable to me.
Just imagine trying to play, say, The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning like that.