extended FAQ

Most of the longer and more technical questions will be answered here. Feedback and opinions are always welcome.

Q: What does PAL mean?
A: PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line and is a method of decoding colours in analogue television. It's widely spread including large parts of Europe, Australia, Africa and South Asia. PAL is commonly used to describe the framerate of games in reference to the 50Hz frequency of Alternating Current (AC) power distribution. Gamecube introduced the usage of PAL-60 which makes games play at NTSC framerates (for example Super Smash Bros. Melee plays at 60 fps compared to 50 on PAL N64 while Ocarina of Time has a framerate of 20 on the Gamecube editions instead of 50/3 on PAL N64 or Wii VC). In the following, I will use PAL as a denotation of 50 fps games.
There are also other methods of forcing PAL hardware to run at NTSC framerates which is banned in most cases of speedrunning and racing. However, region changing a Wii to play NTSC games is fine.

Q: What is the difference besides the framerate?
A: Most games have different language options depending on the regions. Another common thing is a delayed release date and thus implemented changes. I don't know if it has to do with aesthetic properties but PAL Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask misses one frame of the rolling animation leading to a lot of changes. I will create another pastebin to list all differences for tricks, possible skips and eventually setups for all of them.
PAL OoT actually has two different versions which lead to game differences that I'm testing currently. If anyone can perform glitches on those cartridges, please contact me so I can collect information from multiple sources (I'm still working on criteria to look out for but I already figured out most important changes).

Q: Can you compare or convert your times to NTSC?
A: Technically, yes but I wouldn't use the calculated times as an equivalent.
The basic time unit in games is a frame. One frame (visual frame, not input frame) in OoT is a 0.05 second time window on NTSC framerate and 0.06 seconds on PAL. In order to calculate the real time into frames and the amount of frames into real time of the other region, you can simply multiply the time by 5/6 for PAL -> NTSC and multiply by 1.2 for NTSC -> PAL.
For example, one hour on NTSC would equal 60*1.2=72 minutes on PAL and one hour on PAL would equal 60*(5/6)=50 minutes on NTSC. This only applies to identical languages, though so you can only use it for English. The cutscene time differences on ZSR are given for NTSC framerates which theoretically allows a comparison to NTSC-J, too.

However, this leads to another problem more commonly known among communities with an ingame timer which accesses the frames instead of a clock to determine the elapsed time:
There's a conversion error being caused by lag differences. PAL and NTSC consoles have identical hardware so 0.3 seconds of lag would mean 6 frames 'lost' on NTSC but only 5 on PAL. I'm not sure if the slower emulation speed of the game leads to more hardware 'capacity' so the loading zones in OoT would be faster for PAL even in real time. Maybe this will be tested in the future but I currently don't have the means to do it.
Another thing which comes to mind is that you have more time for inputs to hit frame-perfect tricks or have an easier time at mashing. Personally, I don't consider this a huge factor in Ocarina of Time since I'm playing both framerates and my consistency at tricks mainly depends on muscle memory and not at the slight change in framerate. I do realize that this is a huge factor in other games like F-Zero X time attack or in StarFox64/Lylat Wars when you go for highscore runs and can benefit from easier control stick adjustments for better aiming etc.

That's why I don't use the conversion to justify that I (could) beat a certain time on the leaderboards. If speedrunning becomes more important to me, I will also go for NTSC PBs. My current speedruns usually aim at showing the potential of a route on PAL in order to get more people interested in speedrunning PAL and finding glitches/setups for it.