I really hate bumping this, but I was looking for info on this as well. I figured I should clear the air on it.
I believe we have another case of the programmer going "I tested it [on an old crappy DOS nesticle emulator], it worked fine!" and then calling it a day, when in reality it wouldn't run on an NTSC system even if you prayed really hard.
A lot of PAL-only games like Elite stayed PAL-Only because programmers started to take the (compared to NTSC) very, very huge VBLANK for granted. When it came time to port it to the NTSC standard - oh, whoops! The programmer took the whole VBLANK to draw things like polygons to video RAM. This is why some say the PAL NES is "more powerful", when it's not really, it's that programmers figured out how to exploit things like VBLANK for the benefit of the end product. It's a totally rational thing to do - unless you're wanting to have something portable! And since ELITE was a game that depended on tiles being created at run time, the VBLANK is the best place to do all that work.
Stuff like this is why Recca , Kirby's Adventure and Dynamite Batman are so impressive, IMO. Demoscene demos are cool, but cmon, try that on NTSC next time!
