PAL region
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The PAL region is a video game publication territory which covers Australasia and the majority of Europe. The majority of games designated as part of the region will not play on NTSC-US or NTSC-J region consoles because of regional lockout. While this is the most common occurrence, some Xbox and Xbox 360 games are region-free encoded, since Microsoft's policy is for publishers to decide.
Games created for this region are noted for having framerates inferior to their NTSC counterparts due to the 17.5% difference in speed between PAL and NTSC. This makes PAL signals less smooth, however PAL has a larger resolution and less distortion of colour palette than NTSC.
During the sixth generation of consoles developers began to produce PAL60 modes in their games. Games that run at PAL60 are produced with the same encoding system as 50Hz PAL signals, but run at the NTSC framerate of 60.
See also
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