in their PAL incarnations, although also made them slightly easier. Despite the possibility and popularity of 60 Hz games in PAL regions, many high-profile games, particularly for the PlayStation 2 console, were released in 50 Hz-only versions. Square Enix have long been criticised by PAL gamers for their poor PAL conversions. Final Fantasy X, for example, runs in 50 Hz mode only, meaning it runs 16.7% slower than the NTSC release and features top and bottom borders. While this practice was common in previous generations, it was considered inexcusable by contemporary consumers at the time of release, due to the availability of TV sets supporting a 60Hz scan rate with PAL colour (see "PAL 60" above) and RGB or component connections that allow colour output without the need for NTSC or PAL color encoding. In contrast, the Dreamcast was the first system to feature "PAL 60", and the overwhelming majority of PAL games offered 50 and 60 Hz modes with no slow speeds. Xbox and GameCube also had high "PAL 60" support. PAL vs. SECAM The SECAM patents predate those of PAL by several years (1956 vs. 1962). Its creator, Henri de France, in search of a response to known NTSC hue problems, came up with ideas that were to become fundamental to both European systems, namely: colour information on two successive TV lines is very similar and vertical resolution can be halved without serious impact on perceived visual quality more robust colour transmission can be achieved by spreading information on two TV lines instead of just one information from the two TV lines can be recombined using a delay line. SECAM applies those principles by transmitting alternately only one of the U and V components on each TV line, and getting the other from the delay line. QAM is not required, and frequency modulation of the subcarrier is used instead for additional robustness (sequential transmission of U and V was to be reused much later in Europe's last "analog" video systems: the MAC standards). SECAM is free of both hue and saturation errors. It is not sensitive to phase shifts between the colour burst and the chrominance signal, and for this reason was sometimes used in early attempts at colour video recording, where tape speed fluctuations could get the other systems into trouble. In the receiver, it did not require a quartz crystal (which was an expensive component at