Hi Guys,

So I just wanted to see if anyone had some decent knowledge between the difference between PAL and NTSC versions of 16bit era games (Sega Megadrive/SNES)

I am a huge video game collector and I pretty much own every commerical PAL release for the Megadrive and I would love to start doing some sort of series where I do speed runs of the megadrive games and give the SEGA brand some much needed love.

However... Most of my collection is PAL. In recent speed running routing I got a NTSC and PAL copy of "The Terminator" for the Sega Megadrive. Doing the same run, same route (Pretty much identical) The PAL version of the game was on average around 4 minutes slower than the NTSC version.

There are some other noticeable differences like the in game music. The Music in the NTSC is much faster than the PAL and it seems that the overall speed of the game is around x1.5 the speed of PAL.

Now... Is this going to be the case with most 16 bit games? Do NTSC versions run slightly faster than PAL? Or is this a one off? I want to be able to set some competitive times for the games and much rather running it through the hardware than an emulator and rather use my PAL copies instead of everdrive roms.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

First, PAL is 50Hz and NTSC is 60Hz, so NTSC is 20% faster than PAL, that's for the frame frequency, but the gain is not really 20%, because of things, but NTSC's always faster. This works for 99% of the 16 bits (some few games was made to be at almost the same speed). Then, you have to take care of the language used in the game, for example, most of the japanese version are faster because dialogs are shorter.

What if... I get one of my spare PAL consoles and added a 50/60Hz switch to it.

If I run PAL games at 60hz would it effectively be like running the NTSC version with the speed benefit?

I don't know for Megadrive but for SNES, the switched PAL console ain't not at 60Hz ^.^' I heard that from FFVIman, a SNES switcher and he said that switched PAL console run at ~59,7Hz or something like that, so it can be useful for running, grabbing some good times, but probably not for aiming WR.

Well it's not just a region mod. You can add a region override switch to the megadrive but the 60hz switch overclocks the megadrive.

So for JAP games you would switch it to JAP and switch to 60hz.

But I also know you can run PAL on 60hz with the region set to PAL. If it's true 60hz thats a different matter. lol

So then the only ideas I had...

1. Would running a PAL game on a Modded 60hz PAL console give same results of a NTSC console and NTSC game
2. Would buying a NTSC Sega Genesis and making it region free and playing PAL on NTSC console still give the same performance of a NTSC console + NTSC game

I don't know much about Genesis, the only game I ran on it, I ran it on emulator ^.^' But I believe that modded 60Hz console can be close to NTSC console, I hope. Maybe some testing on time could be necessary, that's all I can tell for now with the few knowledge that I have about Genesis :/