European roms of Nes, Snes and MegaDrive run slower than the US version in Retropie?

Spectreman

Sometimes I have the (E) version of a game but I dont know if run like the US/Japan version. That 60 vs 50Hz thing still apply in emulators?

dankcushions

@spectreman yeah it still applies. several emulators use the name of the file to work out what region it is, and whether to run at 50/60hz.

6r360ry

I don't imagine there's a difference in speed... not noticeable, at least. I tend to use European roms when I can, because they're the ones I had. When I've ended up with the US version I haven't noticed a difference... other than the title and boxart sometimes.

Someone may know better, but I wouldn't worry about it.

I just did a quick google search and some people suspect the opposite is true. PAL games should be easier/faster to run as they're designed to run at lower Hz. I'm sticking with the answer that there's probably no noticeable difference.

Edit: Ah, there you go. As dankcushions says it runs at the Hz it's designed to run at.

RetroFreak89

@6r360ry i was just about to say that yes i dont notice a thing between US and EU i use both heh

BobHarris

I always use ntsc roms. pal versions sometimes run noticably slower and have black borders on the top and bottom.
Tekken 2 PAL is so slow, it is unplayable for me now, even though I grew up with PAL versions of all games.

deepthaw

PAL will generally run at a slightly higher resolution at 50hz.
NTSC runs at a slightly lower resolution at 60hz.

A lot of the developers were lazy and/or rushed, and barely altered their NTSC titles to run on PAL systems, so you'll generally find the NTSC version to be superior.

The black bars come from PAL having extra resolution that goes unused, and the slower speed is from them not bothering to adjust the game timings or logic and just having a game that formerly ran at 60hz run at 50hz, which is a 17% slowdown. (Sometimes they didn't even bother adjusting the tempo of the music to compensate!)

The PAL version should be on par or superior for those titles in which the developers actually put in the effort, but I can't recall which those are off-hand.

In the retroarch settings, you can also toggle whether games run at 50/60hz by hand in case that makes it run better.

PHAS

Theories aside, I just racked my Sega Genesis Mini with Project Lunar, and I had to change the European ROMs as they were remarkably slower. The "Batman: the videogame", which is not the fastest action game out there, looked just horrible!

Starting today, I will avoid these European ROMs at all costs.

SuperPitendo

Hey guys! there are 2 solutions and in fact you probably have one solution enabled by default...

My game library contains NTSC and PAL because I want a complete gamelist and I want to have the option of different languages. Of course I prefer the NTSC roms due to the mentioned facts, but for the titles only existing as PAL roms like SNES- Firemen.

Solution #1 (probably enabled by default)
Retroarch has the option of adjusting black bars and game speed. If this option is enabled, retroarch checks if the rom you launch is PAL or NTSC. This is why you dont recognize any speed difference

Solution #2
Romhacking.net is what you need! There are patches for converting from PAL to NTSC and if you dont want to hardpatch, retroarch offers you softpatching.

retropieuser555

It is very noticeable on certain games. Try WWF No Mercy on n64, it's night and day the PAL Vs NTSC versions.