I'm having typical Windows user gripes with my machine causing lagging making speedrunning difficult, and I was thinking seriously of investing in physical equipment to do my runs on. Some input from SMS/SMD runners with expertise in the accuracy comparisons of region mods v native consoles would be greatly appreciated. I am told that an NTSC console would be more accurate, but do not know just how much the difference is. The games I run have very small communities so I should prefer to be maximally accurate as far as timings go since a good investment will pay for itself. And if I go ahead with one or other of these things, what else would I need to handle recording and hookup to a modern tv? Thankyou for reading.
I’m trying to understand what exactly you’re asking. Are you asking if games are faster on PAL or NTSC? Because that really matters for an individual game - PAL may sometimes be faster overall due to exclusive glitches or possible tricks, even though NTSC will always run at a faster frame rate.
If you’re asking about getting a native NTSC console or region modding a console to play NTSC games, that’s a bit trickier because I don’t know much about SMS. Assuming it’s close to a SNES, you’re better off actually getting an NTSC console as the region mod required to play NTSC games on a PAL system (and vice versa) is usually more expensive than just importing the console you need.
Finally, for what equipment you’ll need, I don’t have a lot of experience in that, but you’ll probably need a power adapter to handle the fact that NTSC and PAL take different voltages (I needed an adapter to play a PAL iQue here in the states for example). I’m not sure if that’s still needed nowadays but I wanted to mention it just in case. Most modern TVs I can imagine should be able to handle both signals effectively, but you’ll probably want some kinda upscaler to go from composite/SCART to HDMI unless you have a really low latency monitor/TV or you want to get used to console input delay.
I hope any of that helps or points you in the right direction.