>So it is more like a letter box feel. I'm curious about this too because I never saw Climber 5 on a PAL TV. I just ran it in Z26.
To the best of my understanding, if you pad the top and bottom of an NTSC display with 25 scanlines to support PAL50, then the effect might appear "letterboxed," when in fact it is only compressing the image vertically. A perfect circle on an NTSC display would end up looking like an oval on a PAL50 display. It's probably more accurate to refer to the effect as squash/stretch versus letterboxing.
>Most games I've seen (and that's not a lot of them) have done this. Air-Sea Battle was the first game I saw that adjusted the height of the display to compensate for this.
I haven't seen PAL versions of any game, so I can't say what the common practice is for compensating for alternate video modes. What I do know is that NTSC and PAL60 only differ in palette, while PAL50 differs in palette, aspect ratio and execution speed. So, ideally, PAL50 games should compensate for all three. In Reflex, I will be compensating for palette and execution speed, but not for aspect ratio in PAL50.
I hope I'm helping and not muddying up the waters...
-Lee
