As the PAL territories of the world are eagerly awaiting the Nintendo Wii’s release this Friday, reports start to surface of European early birds trying the Virtual Console system and not being all that happy with it. Seems that the PAL 50Hz system is seriously hampering the quality of some ports that used to run fine on North American and Japanese NTSC 60Hz systems.

CVG reports that their UK Wii’s are having severe troubles running Sonic the Hedgehog and F-Zero downloaded for the Virtual Console service. Apart from having black borders on the top and bottom of the screen, performance is also not making them jump with joy:

We tested Sonic on our PAL system and low and behold the game does indeed sport a pair of black borders along the top and bottom of the screen, but even more worrying is that the PAL version of the game runs significantly slower than the US equivalent, somewhat hampering its speedy platforming gameplay.

Spot the borders?

The problems are related to some classic compatibility problems. Whereas the old PAL standard managed to output 625 interlaced lines 50 times per second, the technically inferior NTSC standard pumped out 525 interlaced lines 60 times per second. Not only does this result in the screen having less height on PAL systems, resulting in the VC letterboxing border nightmare now, but it also meant lots of timing issues at the time since most gaming procedures depend on frames for their timing, executing most game code in the so-called vertical blank section of the screen.

Curiously, the PAL porting problem isn’t a universal one, as both Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario 64 seem to run as supersmooth on PAL boxes as their American counterparts, and show no sign of letterboxing or slowdowns. Nintendo hasn’t commented on CVG’s findings yet, but rest assured Nintendic will report when more news surfaces.