Is it possible to use PAL games and force them to play on 60Hz, for example, SNES, MegaDrive, PSX, etc.? I know there are hacks for these hardware where you can force to output 60Hz for PAL, is there such thing in RA?
edit: this is assuming the PAL game is a bad port and hence running slower than intended, which seems to be the majority of them.
I’m not aware of a systematic, RetroArch-side way to do this, but it’s certainly possible to do for many games on the user’s end.
NES games have nothing internal designating their region, so many emulators quite literally scan the filename. If you rename from (E) to (U), (Europe) to (USA), etc., an emulator like FCEUX will run at 60Hz. Nestopia is a little more complicated, as it can read region information from an external database (NstDatabase.xml, in the RetroArch system directory). If this file isn’t around, Nestopia (at least on RetroArch) seems to just run at 60Hz at all times, but this isn’t really ideal and some games like Crisis Force will fail without the database. Presumably the best solution would be to customize the database and tweak your desired games.
SNES games include some metadata within the ROM documenting their intended regions. This begins at 0x7FC0 or 0xFFC0 (LoROM/HiROM). The region byte is at 0x7FD9/0xFFD9. Japan is 0x00, USA is 0x01, Europe is 0x02. There’s other possible values beyond these, but changing this value to 0x01 in any PAL ROM should make emulators detect it as NTSC. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work, though, as some games do perform region checks. The region check is always the same though, so a tool like SNESTool (ancient, may need to use DOSBox to run on a modern computer) can be used to patch it out.
On the PlayStation, there’s software like PAL4u and Zapper2K which can be used to switch games to NTSC and re-center the image vertically (PAL games run at a higher resolution on the PSX; the extra lines will “hang off the bottom” when they’re forced to NTSC). It’s most effective on 2D games, because 3D games were adjusted so that their field of view matched the PAL aspect ratio, so they’ll still look wrong running on NTSC systems without further (manual) tweaking.
Now, the mainline versions of emulators such as Nestopia and Genesis Plus GX do include options to force a specific region, so you might be able to either add this as a core option, or convince someone else to do so (probably via the cores’ respective issue trackers on GitHub) if you’re unable to do this yourself.
That’s a bit over my head as the emu scene is complicated enough to make it more. At some point I will stop configuring things and just play, so if it isn’t done on the emulator side I think I would not bother because I like keeping the roms untouched now once I started gathering verified romsets. But I really thanks the insight because I bet I’m not the only one interested on this. I thought it wouldn’t be a difficult task for an emulator (force a game to run at 60Hz), either it’s tricky or they just don’t care. I only use PAL roms when they are heavy on text or dialog and they are in Spanish. MegaDrive roms usually come as (USA, Europe) so I think they just change the region automatically.
That sounds like a potential Core Option. Dunno if anything actually implement that, but it’s possible in theory at least.