Retro STrife wrote:Yeah I've seen adapters on ebay for around $25 or so, which seem to be for this purpose. On other forums, I've seen some people say that playing PAL games in the US may cause issues with the music and run speed, but I can't confirm that...maybe it varies from game to game.
It does vary. Games developed in Japan and the States were originally programmed around the NTSC standard's frequency of 60 Hz, and not all European releases compensate for the difference with PAL's 50 Hz.
Sonic the Hedgehog is an especially glaring case of this
unsettling effect, an inexcusable oversight when Sonic's entire point is to go fast.
What this means is that only games developed for NTSC territories
and given sloppy, unaltered PAL releases will run at the right speed from a PAL cartridge in an NTSC system - at which point you might as well just play the NTSC version in the first place. PAL exclusives are all but guaranteed to run skittishly fast over here.
Retro STrife wrote:In my entire life, I've only owned one PAL game -- Zero Wing for the Mega Drive (Genesis). It's the game famous for the old "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme, but there was no US version of the game, so you need the PAL version in order to play it. I was able to get the game running on my US Genesis with no adapters and it works 100% fine on my TV.
I would bet money that it actually works 120% fine, speed-wise. Either that, or it only ever worked 83.333% fine originally. (I'd compare the European and Japanese releases in an emulator to determine this conclusively, but sheesh, even I have better things to do.) And it's not the game that works or doesn't work with your TV; it's the system. The program on the cartridge is irrelevant - what matters is that the video signal is coming from hardware running at 60 Hz. Good luck getting a PAL Mega Drive to work with an NTSC tube.