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Sony PlayStation emulation—which is part of the new PlayStation Plus service—has problems with its 50Hz rendering.
PS1 games running on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 have had some trouble with frame rates and ghosting effects. Sony has opted for the European PAL version of many of its classic game offerings, because of their localisation advantages. (They feature a minimum of five languages.)
Unfortunately, the PAL versions of PS1 games only ran at 50Hz—rather than the 60Hz that was standard for American NTSC and Asian-territory versions. This means, basically, that, because their refresh rate is lower, the performance of these games is slower. Games run at more choppy frame rates.
Sony has issued a patch, attempting to address these performance issues. However, the patch—which affects Jumping Flash, Everybody’s Golf and Intelligent Qube—makes these 50Hz games run in 60Hz. Only, it does this by blending frames together, which creates a weird ghosting effect.
Check out the images below (via VGC):
Sony has released a patch for a few PS1 Classics on the PS4/PS5 that "improves" the PAL output.
The patch upscales the PAL code to 60hz by blending frames.
But the technique has introduced these horrible ghosting artifacts.
Here's a before and after comparison.#ps5 #ps4 pic.twitter.com/S1yphRrKuQ
— Windy Corner TV – Robert (@windycornertv) May 27, 2022
As you can see, it seems as if you need to rub your eyes or something. Nintendo encountered similar issues with its own game emulation. The solution was rather simply: it allowed players to download both PAL and NTSC version of old games. That way, the localised versions were available to those that needed them. And the NTSC version were available to those who preferred to higher refresh rate.
It’s also worth noting that not all games are affected by this problem. Some releases, such as Syphon Filter apparently are the NTSC versions. We will have to wait and see what Sony does to address the problem.
In other recent PS1 game news, Dino Crisis may be making its way onto the new PS Plus catalogue.
