i set my european saturn so it can play japanese games but still runs in 50hz. some might consider me crazy but the NTSC output of the Saturn sucks pretty bad (it’s nowhere near PAL60) and I have a new 100Hz TV (there pretty common in PAL countries, I guess in the US 60Hz is enough? never found a 120Hz set) so now I can enjou my japanese PD games in full PAL 100Hz splendor =DD
So?
has anyone ever resolved the mstery of the flashing white square in the bottom left corner in PDS on some saturns? does it have to do with the game?
omg! i’m so happy you mentioned this! (hm in fact ive never seen it mentioned here before)
This appears randomly for me, (sometimes even in the FMV intro)
i just thought it was my bad luck because my games always seem to do things weird compared to the normal versions…
i don’t know what causes it however ^_^; or how to fix it
Funny you mentioned this. While playing my copy yesterday, the white square appeared in place of my “.” during FMV sequences. It also replaces numbers. Thoughts?
I’m assuming it has something to do with my Saturn and not the game itself, since the game itself is still in pristine condition after all the years.
I have the white square since 1998…
hm, I noticed it too when i had SAGA in PAL Saturn attached to the TV card in my PC. has anyone attached his saturn with the RGB scart cable like me?
Yeah, the different regional versions of the Saturn are unfortunately hardwired to just do one kind of video output each: PAL Saturns just do 50Hz PAL, NTSC Saturns just do 60Hz NTSC. AFAIK a PAL Saturn is simply set up to do its processing slower than the non-PAL hardware in order to output less frames per second, so import games don’t just run at a reduced framerate when run on a PAL system, they run slower than they should.
If you’re comfortable doing a bit of soldering, it’s possible to hack in a switch to make a PAL Saturn output at 60Hz (there are a few guides to doing this around the net). Off the top of my head I don’t know if this makes it output PAL60 or just switches it over to NTSC though, so it might not be the solution you’re looking for.
[quote=“Neil”]Funny you mentioned this. While playing my copy yesterday, the white square appeared in place of my “.” during FMV sequences. It also replaces numbers. Thoughts?
I’m assuming it has something to do with my Saturn and not the game itself, since the game itself is still in pristine condition after all the years.[/quote]
Hmm, that sounds like something different, unless the white square I’ve always got is the different thing; what I get is a flickering white square that’s always present at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen during FMV sequences. I’ve had this problem since day one as well, but the square only turns up occasionally, is there for every FMV if it’s there at all, and turning the Saturn off and on again usually solves the problem.
I always hook my Saturns up through either RGB scart or S Video, and I’ve never had the white square problem in either my PAL or JP versions of the game. Weird, eh?
Off the top of my head I don’t know if this makes it output PAL60 or just switches it over to NTSC though, so it might not be the solution you’re looking for. <<
Wouldn’t it have to be NTSC? As PAL is higher res than NTSC, I would think that the software may not be run at a higher res and at 60- usually they push that perf as close they can.
100Hz! Cool!
The Game runs far too slow in 100Hz.
PDS was not programmed to compensate or Vsync to 50Hz so it just runs 20% Slower than normal.
To achieve high quality 60Hz, Buy an RGB cable for your Saturn, if your TV cannot accept RGB but can accept component, buy an RGB to Component Adapter.
[quote=“gearguy”]The Game runs far too slow in 100Hz.
PDS was not programmed to compensate or Vsync to 50Hz so it just runs 20% Slower than normal.[/quote]
I can’t really see how an RPG can run “too slow” 
IMHO that would be like “water is too wet” or something.
… You know its funny you say that but the difference in framerate and speed is actually quite obvious between the two speeds…
But if playing the game with a 20% speed deficiency doesn’t bother you then by all means do so. However playing in 50Hz also distorts the FMVs 
as they are encoded at ‘NTSC-60’ resolutions, when they are played in ‘PAL-50’ mode they get re-scaled using nearest neighbour inrepolation which blocks them up quite a bit.
The “White Square” is supposed to be off-screen, when the game was developed the majority of TV’s were CRT, and most CRTs are configured to crop the image by an inch or so, so originally, on NTSC-60 mode, the square would be cut off. However when the game is played on PAL-50 or on a system with no over-scan area, the off-screen garbage is on-screen.
Quite why it’s there in the first place, I do not know. I know that on my first Saturn it was intermittently there however when I replaced my Saturn with a different model, it’s always there, so I assume it’s a bug of some sort that is affected by specific conditions of the graphics chip? Who knows.
well since I’m german I have never seen the fmvs unscaled in the first place since they were not converted for the PAL release. and the fmvs are not 60 or 30fps but something like 15fps or so anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. still 100hz on a good PAL tv still looks far better than NTSC so I really don’t care for the speed difference, it’s really hardly noticable on an RPG.
Are you cropping the black borders? I assume it’s a widescreen TV so you;d probably be stretching the image anyway, right? OH man those were the days, back when European games all had fuggin HUGE bars at the top and bottom. Master System anyone? 
None of this really makes sense to me, but then I don’t have any experience with PAL and the Euro conversion issues other than what I know from trying to play PAL Amiga games on my US hardware…
Still, I am sincerely mystified by the concept that playing a game - ANY KIND OF GAME - 20% slower wouldn’t bother you, yet the difference between a 60hz and 100hz refresh - which has absolutely no impact on the the experience other than a, for most people, slight improvement in the stability/quality of the image - means the world?
You seem to be a very peculiar individual Lord Craymen, in that, within this example, your eyes are much more sensitive than your brain?
The difference isn’t that noticeable when -
A) You have nothing to compare it to
B) Almost every game released in your country for the past twenty years has the same problem.
However, as soon as you look at something like this - uk.youtube.com/watch?v=b0llsb77Esc - it becomes obvious. Personally, as a PAL gamer I hate unoptimised games. It’s lazy, easily fixed, and squishes everything up (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night being a particularly bad example).
as kimimi said, the speed difference is hardly noticable if you have nothing to compare it too.
also, in PDS there is no connection between refresh rate of the TV and the actual fps the game runs in (unlike PDZ that runs interlaced throughout the game). PDS runs progressive and it doesn’t even run with constant frame rate, it’s more like between 30 and 20 or even lower.
if it was PDZ you were definately right, you notice the difference in speed already during the opening FMV when the video and sound become asynchronous and after a second or so “snap back”. but in PDS sound and visuals stay synchrounous all the time whether you run it in 50, 60Hz, and since there are no time critical sequences (it’s and rpg, duh) the game experience doesn’t get spoiled in any way. as kimimi said you might notice the difference when you had 2 tv sets running the game. but the you had one set flickering like hell in 60 Hz and one set showing smooth eye freindly 100Hz like a PC monitor.
about the black borders, well yeah that was a problem back in the days you could not zoom into the tv image. but now you can, so what’s the deal. a tv screen is analog anyway (“theoretically!” you might insist, there is still the “shadow mask” that sets a physical limit, but my tv is HDTV compatible, the shadow mask is way finer than the one of an old PAL set), so zooming into the picture doesn’t affect anything. in fact, it gives better quality than a game converted from NTSC 680x460 “pixels” to PAL 720x568 (or even worse 768x576 since sqare pixels don’t look that good on a tv screen that actually doesn’t know “pixels” only “lines”) . in the PAL release of PDS every 2D fullscreen image has a doubled row every 8th pixel or so. to get rid of the borders. if you zoom the NTSC version you don’t get visual artifacts at all…
and the refresh rate does have an impact of the visual smoothness of an animation, that’s what makes animations with less frames look more “cinematish” than for example tv images (ok, thre is some extra magic to it as well, but try to push a LOTR dvd sequence (24fps) to true 60fps using a software like motionperfect and it will look like shot with a consumer level digital camera).
Of course when running in 50Hz you do get a lower fps, it maxes at 25 with saga in pal, 30 in ntsc. Also PDZ doesnt run in interlaced, it runs in 240p 50/60hz. Or at least thats what SSF runs it as and thats what it looks like on TV. Not all games get scaled to Pal, some render in pal nativley.
However, the aspect ratio is still effectivley, humped, unless your TV can allow you to manually adjust the vertical image width.
Still if your that bothered about image quality you’d be playing with RGB-60 and not ‘Ntsc’ in the first place.