Xbox account region change - what about NTSC/PAL?

Question

So it appears that it is possible to change the region of your Xbox Live account. That's great news since I've moved to another country and had difficulties buying games on marketplace since my credit card is issued in a region different from the account region.

The thing is though that I was in a PAL region and now I am in an NTSC region. Because of that I was forced to order my games from UK. After I change the account region will my console be able to play local NTSC games? What will hapen to my PAL games I already own?

Answer 1

PAL and NTSC are not actually where you may think in a game. It is encoded into the default.xex which is what runs when you tell the Xbox to launch a game. You can change the location of your account but that may not help in the case of playing games from many all three of the regions. To play these games from many regions does not have any hardware prerequisites other than an Xbox. It is actually the software. The ways to actually be able to play these the simplest would be getting a modified console or a dev-kit. I would have to say that the credit card is not the issue if you are buying the games from the marketplace. The underlying issue is the operating system being a one region only one. Currently my best piece of advice would be get a new console or modify your current one to be able to put software from a computer onto it. Good luck figuring it out.

Answer 2

PAL and NTSC are the colour encoding systems used in various parts of the world. While most regions use one or the other, you'll find that most modern televisions will happily play either format. Furthermore, most console will also play games from a format that they weren't intended to.

It's likely that you were instead experiencing difficulty with Region Codes, and region limited distribution (the term has slipped my mind for now, someone feel free to edit if you know what I mean).

In theory, and most likely practice, you should be perfectly fine to play your PAL games in your NTSC console (assuming your television supports both formats), as this functionality has been around since the original PlayStation.