How to know if my Saturn games are PAL or not?

RetroArch
#1

Lately, I’ve been replacing PAL titles in my collection with NTSC versions. I can identify them in some way for other systems, for example - on PSX I took out the PAL BIOS and tested games until they gave a “firmware is missing!” error, for Dreamcast the boot screen has a blue circle if PAL. But on Saturn I’m lost on how to do it.

edit: found a way! Although the BIOS is shared between NTSC and PAL and the boot animation is the same, If you set region to Europe in mednafen options, then restart retroarch, and load a non-PAL game, instead of loading the game, it will say “Game disk unsuitable for this system” when the boot screen finishes.

#2

I have NO IDEA how to recongnize a PAL or NTSC Saturn disk image! But I have a lot of time invested in Saturn emulation.

Make sure your disk image works correctly using another emulator, I’ve been reworking all my images to make them properly work with Mednafen/Beetle Saturn core.

I’ve tested my disk images with a combination of SSF emulator and Daemon Tools, to be sure that have the game and music tracks inside, then I’ve redone the disk image with ImgBurn, using CUE/BIN format, that is very very friendly for all LibRetro Cores.

I hope that you can fix your problem and enjoy Saturn games.

#3

That’s the only core he is mentioning actually, since mednafen = beetle (no idea why it was renamed in libretro).

Considering original hardware was able to load any region with the appropriate modification and no alternative bios, i’m not sure relying on bios to figure it out is appropriate, especially since bettle saturn is using the same bios (mpr-17933.bin) for both NTSC-U and PAL.

Afaik, the only way to figure out if a game is PAL or NTSC, if you don’t own a proper iso indicating the region in the filename, is the framerate (50 for PAL, 60 for NTSC). However i’m not sure mednafen/beetle is respecting framerate (afaik they don’t respect resolutions)

#4

Oops, he/she did mentioned the core. My bad! As an apologize, I’ve edited my original comment.