There are some 60Hz patches that exist for PAL games. I use some and they work fine (some glitches here and there but nothing too annoying). Maybe you can try…
If I’m reading this correctly, and I just wanna be sure before I start diving into this as a project, these 3 functions (Exclusive Fullscreen, Video X/Y, and Refresh Rate) used properly together will just automatically call on an existing modeline? This is essentially what CRTSwitchRes does, minus the in-game switching, correct?
So, in essence, you could create game/core/directory overrides to force games to run at w/e resolution you wanted - so long as the modeline is installed and RetroArch can pull it up.
Thinking I could force my PAL stuff to run at that 1920x512 @ 50Hz and worry about scanlines via shader lol
Yes, that’s the gist of it.
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this is not entirely accurate, i think… There are several good games from european developers! they often programmed their games with a pal-homecomputer or pal-console in mind.
for example: playing a official NTSC-conversation of any port/version of Turrican 1+2 at 60fps results in strange (unintended) enemy-timings and other issue. Only playing the PAL-game on a PAL-System with 50Hz Display-Refreshrate will give you an allmost authentic experience for it.
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There needs to be a database of PAL games or something with their listed ‘proper’ speeds. This is fascinating. I didn’t know this about Turrican.
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Yea so I just found out my NTSC CRT cannot do 50 hz 240p. Too low.
I don’t want to half ass anything here as I read Pal Master System games are unplayable at 60hz, they are too fast and as some said Pal exclusives when patched don’t run correctly. This is also a big issue with Atari 2600 games because many NTSC variants use 50hz refresh and when sped up they don’t feel right.
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Somebody correct me if I’m wrong but that will not work. Scan lines will not be noticeable if ran in interlace resolution.
Before using crt emu driver I tried cheating and using an svideo our card and tried to add a scan line shader and the lines do not show up because of how interlacing works.
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The 50 Hz equivalent to 240p is 288p. You can keep 240 active lines only, but the number of total lines is what matters, you need to increase them (usually it’s around 312 on PAL vs 262 on NTSC) to fit within the 15 Khz.
I believe many NTSC CRTs don’t like PAL timings (and vice versa), though.
Thank you, I will try to mess with Arcade OSD and see if I can get that going. Right now I have 288p @ 51hz, and I get vertical screen rolling 
General rule of thumb is if it’s PAL only then it was made to be played at 50hz.
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I am from europe and i will say that nearly all PAL-TVs manufactered in the 90ies (or later) can do NTSC at 60Hz via RGB-SCART without any issues or modifying. I use 2 of these babies to this day, mainly for 240p stuff like groovymame. I connected the TVs with an simply DIY VGA to SCART Adapter Cable. The PQ is nearly comparable to an Arcade-CRT (incl. fancy scanlines in 60Hz-Mode) 
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Actually yes, your right. I think for most scanline shaders to work it’s gotta be >2x scale, and seeing as how most need integer scaling to look right, that means a min of 3x scale. That’s a resolution of 768 minimum 
I’d forgotten about this, but I ran into this as well using an HDMI>RF converter and was irritated I was forcing all games to 480i.