Pal or NTSC - which roms to use?

[MontyMole]

 Briefly, I've obtained about 150gb of Saturn roms, but all games come in a set of two - Pal and NTSC. By deleting one set I am going to save about 75gb of hard drive space! Which set should I keep?

Longer version - Living in the UK, I only got to use Pal games back in the day, and I do remember UK magazines at the time such as Computer & Video Games talking about how the NTSC version of Tekken 2 for the PS1 (as just one example) was a lot faster than the PAL version, so my gut feeling is to get rid of all the PAL roms. But then I do wonder if any PAL versions of games were significantly different to be worth keeping also ?

[neil9000]

1 minute ago, MontyMole said:

 Briefly, I've obtained about 150gb of Saturn roms, but all games come in a set of two - Pal and NTSC. By deleting one set I am going to save about 75gb of hard drive space! Which set should I keep?

Longer version - Living in the UK, I only got to use Pal games back in the day, and I do remember UK magazines at the time such as Computer & Video Games talking about how the NTSC version of Tekken 2 for the PS1 (as just one example) was a lot faster than the PAL version, so my gut feeling is to get rid of all the PAL roms. But then I do wonder if any PAL versions of games were significantly different to be worth keeping also ?

PAL roms run at 50Hz, NTSC ones at 60Hz, so yes NTSC are faster and how they were for the most part designed to run at. I am also in the UK and grew up with PAL, but all my roms are the US versions due to them running at the correct speed and not being slowed down.

[fraganator]

Hi @MontyMole

NTSC is probably the way to go. The 60Hz rate looks good on modern TVs, and doesn't require 50Hz to 60Hz resampling. Technically the NTSC format is lower resolution than PAL (480 lines vs 576 lines), but I don't think many PAL releases took advantage of the higher resolution, and instead opted for black bars. So though PAL is higher resolution, the end result looks smaller on screen because of the bars.

The only real factor to consider is regional differences between games. I grew up with EU / PAL games too, and prefer playing the PAL versions of certain games because that's what I remember. Things like music or voice acting can differ between regional releases. If there are any favourite games you remember playing in PAL format, it might be worth keeping both versions around (unless the NTSC one is obviously better).

What file format are the Saturn games in? If they're a zip or uncompressed cue+bin, you can reduce space by converting them to chd.