GlossaryWhat PAL, NTSC-U and NTSC-J Actually Mean for CollectorsPut a PAL copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 next to an American one and press start. The European version runs noticeably slower — music and all — because it was built for a different television standard, not for your convenience. That's region coding in one sentence: the same game on the same silicon, behaving differently depending on which continent's TV signal it was designed to feed.
If you buy retro games across borders, these three-letter codes decide what you can play, how it runs, and what y