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What does pals mean?

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Anonymous

12y ago
Updated: 9/17/2019

PAL is a video format standard. It was used in many European countries. PAL stands for 'Phase Alternate Line', each second it would draw half of the screen first (via alternate lines, leaving a gap in between) and then complete the frame by drawing in the other lines. This process is also called interlacing.

Because PAL format ran at 50Hz and NTSC ran at 60Hz, this affected many older video game consoles which were designed to play at 60Hz. If the PAL conversion was not timed properly, it would suffer around a 17% slowdown.

Now that the video format is mostly obsolete, PAL can also refer simply to region-locked hardware sold in the PAL region. For example one could refer to a PAL 3DS console, even though the 3DS's video format is the same across all regions, it does not use PAL format.

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