uriyasama said:
Game Dragon said:
uriyasama said:
on that wikipedia page it is stated that australia uses the pal region system and europe consoles use pal
therefore europe software can work on an australia 3DS
I want proof, Nintendo are not that dumb on relying on system format for regain detection
Has anyone tried it?
system format and region are the same thing.
No, he's partially right. They're not.
PAL (short for Phase Alternating Line) is an encoding standard for TVs used in Europe, Australia, and much of the rest of the world, as opposed to NTSC, used in North America. Traditionally, part of the reason region codes are divided up the way they are is because of the division between those encoding standards -- you have to make different home consoles for US and Europe anyway, so you might as well divide them into regions. In fact, supporting only one format gave them a sort of region locking without having to devote any further effort to it.
Later, more specific region codes were used for DVD players; since most home consoles double as DVD players now, and since they're already used in a lot of places, these region codes got copied onto home consoles.
Obviously, the PAL vs NTSC distinction is meaningless on a 3DS, because it's not hooked up to a TV (so anyone above who is talking about PAL is confused.) And the DVD region codes aren't so relevant, either. So it's true that PAL vs NTSC format isn't relevant to the 3DS, and it's not totally unreasonable to assume that, because of this, Nintendo might have decided to divide the regions up differently than they usually are.
However, they did not (probably for the last reason -- every big company already has its database and market plans divided up based on the existing DVD region codes, making it more useful for the 3DS to follow that division even though there's no technical reason why they'd have to. If you're a major international electronics company who's already dividing up all your DVD players and home consoles based on existing DVD region codes, you're not going to want to have to deal with specific new categories for the 3DS.)