Region Coding: Difference between revisions

This page discusses region coding, region-based lockouts, and other producer-supplied controls that restrict the use of their media in certain geographical areas.

 

* C - The former USSR, China and other parts of Asia not covered by Region A

 

 

However for most consoles, natural lockouts do exist due to differing television display formats (currently based on declining analog formats, which will most likely persist into the future despite the fact that they're not relevant with digital).:

** Interestingly, this does ''not'' apply to early portable consoles. They lack region protection, on the theory that someone with one of these should be able to pick up a game for his system no matter where in the world he goes (the lack of a TV may have played a part, see below). For this reason, portables are extremely common amongst import gamers from any country. However, with today's portable consoles, companies combat these solutions with mandatory updates required to play games released from there on out.

*** The [[Nintendo DS|DSi]] has region locking, but only for specific [[Nintendo DS|DSi]] features, such as differing online features for each region. Future games will still be region-free, with the exception of downloadable ones.

*** The [[Nintendo 3DS]] has introduced Region Lock on cartridge games, [[Insane Troll Logic|in hopes of combating piracy]].

** Strangely for home consoles, all PS3 games are region-free, and Xbox 360 region locking has always been at game publishers' discretion.

* In the analog age, differing TV (and electrical) standards were used as a sort of de facto regional lock-in technology. Since NTSC (typically 60&nbsp;Hz) and PAL/SECAM (typically 50&nbsp;Hz) <ref>PAL and SECAM are also different systems. And well, as noted below, it gets more complicated</ref> hardware are completely incapable of dealing with content from the other system without absurdly expensive translation hardware, this kept import trade to a minimum. Many newer PAL/SECAM TVs now offer a special 60&nbsp;Hz mode, and nearly every PC TV tuner/AV accessory has always supported all three standards. If all you've got are American TVs and set-top receivers, you're still hosed, though, unless you have a fairly expensive NTSC/PAL television.

** It gets even more complicated. PAL, SECAM and NTSC are only ''color'' encoding standards (though they typically have a refresh rate attached, the refresh rate is actually ''optional''. That's why there's bastard systems like 60&nbsp;Hz PAL and 50&nbsp;Hz NTSC). Ever wonder what are those letter suffixes that follows a system name when you look at the technical specifications page of a world multi TV manual? That's the ''transmission'' standard, which goes all the way from System A to System S. This is really where the TV resolution, refresh rate, and audio-visual frequency offset is defined. It's possible to mix and match transmission standard and color encoding standards, though PAL typically use B, D, E, G, H, I, K, M, N and NC, NTSC typically use M (though Japan's system could be arguably called NTSC-M'(M-prime) due to the slight luminance rating difference), and SECAM typically use B, D, G, H, K, K'(K-Prime) and L. And that's not counting abandoned systems like System A (which went through a brief trial period with all three color encoding standards by the BBC in the late 40s), and System S. Wait, there's more! This has nothing to do the the PAL, NTSC-J, NTSC/UC, NTSC-K and NTSC-C standards used for region locking game consoles. The latter bunch of imaginary NTSC variants were drummed up by marketroids to state what region code a game is for! You don't have to get confused tho- these don't really come into play as far as line input is concerned- only resolution and refresh rate are really important here with line input, and these systems should fall out of use as countries switch over to digital. On the other hand...

[[Category:Home Video Tropes]]

[[Category:Videogame Culture]]

[[Category:Pages with working Wikipedia tabs]]