GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Gruelius]

Hi all,

we have played goldeneye for ages (PAL) and i just purchased a RGB modded NTSC n64 and a everdrive.

Got the RGB to component convertor now i just need to convince my mates that the NTSC version (with patches) is better than PAL, what reasons should i give?

or was the game originally developed on PAL consoles?

[zoinkity]

It was developed for both.

The only advantage, and I mean only, of playing the US release is that it happens to be the only title the editor supports. There's a stack of reasons for this (and personally I feel the japanese release would have been a better choice) but there you go.

As for just playing a vanilla title, PAL is not only formatted for your screen, it also happens to be the better build. Japan received some bug fixes, but PAL received roughly twice as many. Things like the debug menu and speccy were removed and many tables reduced in size. Basically, it's the game streamlined and patched.

So it's user content versus final build.
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[SubDrag]

Heh, the reason the editor is NTSC and not JAP is I can't read Japanese and I'm American. :p You prob could say you could just inject Japanese text files though? Not sure we have a Japanese->English patch for it. Also all the GameShark codes were hacked for NTSC (or PAL) and/or ported to NTSC, don't even know if any Japanese codes exist or what conversion is. But yeah at least it would've worked on my tv. Also have the debug menu is really nice.

[zoinkity]

All ROMs contain both the US and japanese scripts, plus PAL has the british script as well. Conversion consists of setting the region flag, which is how the japanese<->english patches were made. Also, it has debug and speccy ;*)

There's three conversions depending on where in 21990 you are. Beginning is the same, there's a +0x10 at some point and another +0x20 later on. Data formatting is, as far as I know, identical to US.

I only say japanese since it happened to have most of the useful bugfixes already applied. The rest were basically defaults for tables so a bad value doesn't break. It was a primary source for the ported bugfixes for US--a project I really need to start back up sometime.
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[Sogun]

zoinkity wrote:

All ROMs contain both the US and japanese scripts, plus PAL has the british script as well.

Wait. NTSC and PAL text are different?
I understand that in other games the text would be addapted to the way British and American communicates (unused words, different expressions...). But in GoldenEye the main characters are British, so it won't make sense that they sound/read like anything else.

[zoinkity]

Pttbbb...

By that logic George Washington would have a british accent, and everyone knows he's all-american.

Seriously though, you'd think the game would have followed british spelling conventions, but no. Plus, believe it or not PAL has three sets of text, and you can tell which are which via suffix: E, J, and P.

Madness. PURE MADNESS.
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Last edited by zoinkity on Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:16 am; edited 1 time in total

[Gruelius]

I was more thinking of the framerate differences? I.E. Battletoads on nes was developed for NTSC, pal release had bugfixes but was also slower (and easier)

[zoinkity]

There's no significant framerate difference, although PAL doesn't seem to slow down quite as heavy. That's probably on account of all the cluttersome debug stuff that was finally stripped from it.
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[nadbohr]

you forgot to mention that the NTSC' has big black borders on bottom and top screen. pal is perfect on 16:9 fullscreen.

[Dragonsbrethren]

PAL has a slightly lower horizontal field of view, though, while vertical remains the same as NTSC. It's not a major difference, but it's something to consider. Those borders aren't taking any of the view away, and in fact the NTSC version is showing a little more.

(PD's field of view in normal res is the same in both games, but again PAL runs in higher resolution. Hi-Res mode, however, is lower resolution than NTSC. NTSC doubles the horizontal resolution, PAL only increases it by ~140%. Not that anyone in their right mind uses Hi-Res mode in a game that drops to such low framerates in normal res.)

[nadbohr]

thanks for the information. I noticed that single player looks good in 16:9, but 2 player mode is very stretched. 4 player looks OK again in 16:9.

was is the best way to play the game. I mean the way it was designed to be? 4:3 all the time? (note that the single player does have the option for widescreen and cinema and confusingly both in 4:3 and 16:9. maybe rare didn't get the right idea of those modes?!?!)

[Dragonsbrethren]

Well, they added the 16:9 option so obviously they expected some people to take advantage of it. 16:9 runs at the same resolution as normal, it just increases FOV and expects your display to stretch the image. The Wide and Cinema options are there if you want to use widescreen on a 4:3 display. (They're probably also a cute way of renaming smaller screen sizes, ala old DOS FPS games, but personally I've never noticed a frame rate increase with them enabled.)

I've never really taken a look at multiplayer with the different options, but two player multiplayer already uses a wider screen for each player than single player, so 16:9 is going to stretch that even farther.