Do NTSC Dancing Games play on a Pal PS2 correctly?

[Adrock]

I remember a while back having a problem with importing an NTSC version of DDR and obviously realised after i played it i had problems playing it because the playback was out of sync.

Does anyone know if the ps2 has the same issues? I've played Dancing Stage Euromix enough now so i wanna try something new and the pal dancing games are pretty poor.

Thanks

[Naiera]

The PS2 has the same issues.

[pcb_revival]

Alternative.

Why not try the DDR clone - Stepmania on PC.

http://www.stepmania.com/stepmania/

[lostn]

Why is it only dance games have sync issues?

[charlaph]

[guess]It's because the images are meant to be tied to streamed music, so you realise they're out of synch. All other import games that stream music suffer exactly the same, but because the images aren't meant to be in synch with the music, you just don't notice.[/guess]

That's my theory. I can't think of any other game that has streamed music that's meant to match up to the onscreen action.

[Chadruharazzeb]

Why would that happen, the game should still run @ 60Hz if your machine's chipped....

[charlaph]

I was just working on the assumption that if it happens (for whatever reason) with dance games, then it would happen for all games.... don't know though, just a guess.

Is it to do with the 4% speedup? which would affect the images, but not the sound streaming from the CD/DVD.

Shot in the dark, mind.

[Nisa]

This question has probably been answered a thousand times. Most of the early Japanese DDR games i.e. 3rd,4th,5th & Extra Mix do not sync properly on either a modded PAL PS One or PS2 without using Action Replay/Exploder sync codes and even with those codes it doesn't work 100%, at points in the game the audio will often stutter or just not play at all.

If you intend on buying a DDR game for your PS2 then buy the Japanese PS2 versions e.g. DDR Max,DDR Max 2 & DDR Extreme (Extreme is by far the best in the series) none of them have any sync problems and they are far superior to the pathetic PAL versions both in terms of presentation and the amount of songs available (Extreme has over 100 songs). If you want to play the older NTSC versions then I'm afraid you'll need an NTSC machine to play them properly.

Strangely DDR is the only game in Konami's Bemani series to have these sync problems as Guitar Freaks/Drummania, Pop' n Music & the Beatmania/Beatmania IIDX games all run fine on PAL machines.

[lostn]

But like Chad said... if they are running in 60hz, they should be full speed, so why does it matter what PS2 you are running it on?

The movies should play at the same speed as they do on an NTSC machine.

The PAL PS2 actually runs import games in NTSC mode, so why does it make a difference whether you run a jap game a NTSC console or on a PAL console in NTSC mode? It should be identical right?

Is it to do with the 4% speedup? which would affect the images, but not the sound streaming from the CD/DVD.

4% speedup should only apply on PAL movies. Since the game will be running in NTSC mode, there shouldnt be any speedup.

[Darwock]

Same reason Ikaruga runs slower than the background music on a PAL Dreamcast I guess.

[Saurian]

lostn

The past DDR games do not run in sync on a PAL PS1 or PS2, action replay codes are required to sync the sound and vision - Nisa has laid it down exactly as it is with regards to this vs other music games from Konami and full compatibility with newer DDRs and PAL machines.

The steps on the past games are not movies but sprites, the image always seems to be correct but the sync issues I assumed were to do with disk start/access time.

[Magnakai]

I believe it's to do with how the music's stored on the disk. I seem to remember some of the old Troc DDR crew laying it out for me like this:

The music's stored in compressed slices, as there's no way to fit that much CD quality audio onto a disc. The speed at which they're extracted is based on the PS's clock speed for some reason, which on a PAL machine is 50Hz compared to 60Hz on an NTSC machine. Thus we get the syncing problems.

The PS2 versions are presumably on DVD, so they don't have the compression induced problems that the PSone versions do.

I think a lot of it's to do with chipped PS2s not playing PSone games in the same way as they play PS2 games. Someone else can probably tell you a lot more about that.

Anyway, hope this helped!