Out of boredom, I decided to take all 44 games already available on the Wii's Virtual console and see how many of them wouldn't work if SEGA just pulled an easy fix to their MegaDrive emulator's inability to display the games in 60Hz (except for Shining Force, which I can't find the PAL ROM of).


This is the positive stuff I found out:

-29 of them would work perfectly by just setting the emulator to US (or to Japanese in case of Streets of Rage 3* and Golden Axe 3). There's absolutrely no excuse for these not being run in 60Hz already when desired.
-3 of them (Ecco 2, Light Crusader and Sonic 3) would work even with their own region-specific sound and screen settings by just editing the header's country code to either JUE or F.


And then, there's the problematic ones:

-3 of them (namely, Comix Zone, Sonic Spinball and Panic on Funkotron) would work by changing the country code, but then the music plays too fast or they have screen placement issues. I don't think anything can be done about these, other than using the US ROMs.
-As you may know, Sonic 3D shows a different title in any non-PAL mode. I wonder if it would be possible to put "Flickies' Island" back with a simple byte change in the ROM...
-Streets of Rage 2 can be run in Japanese mode, but then it reads "Bare Knuckle 2" in the title screen. It might not be possible to play it in US mode without it hanging after the SEGA logo, or would it?
-I can't get the PAL versions of Alien Soldier, Mean Bean Machine, Gunstar Heroes, Landstalker, Shinobi 3 or The Story of Thor to work in any 60Hz mode, as they keep giving the region lockout message whatever I put in the header.


Does anybody know of any other ways to make these locked out games work properly in both modes? I don't know much about how this stuff works, so there might be a lot of stuff I'm missing.



I was thinking that, perhaps, if somebody told the right people at SEGA how to do their work, we'd have 60Hz MegaDrive games in the Wii's Virtual Console. I'd better not talk about their current emulator's terrible sound inaccuracies and sound buffer bugs, how I wish Steve Snake had been involved in this...



*EDIT: By the way, what's with SoR3's music in PAL mode? Was the speed as inconsistent in a real PAL system or is Kega doing something wierd with it?

I was planning to get my Mega Drive modded with a 50hz/60hz switch, lol.

In this thread, one hobbyist non-professional person does better work than a paid staff of official people.

From what I remember with fannying about in the ROM, I believe the answer's yes. And yeah, giving Europe 60Hz games is easy as piss, it's just everyone wants to cripple our market needlessly again...

I've just found out that DRX's prototype is the only version of Dashin' Desperadoes that works in PAL mode (and doesn't in NTSC).


...So it's a unique proto of a PAL version we never got. Nice.

Same for Bubble & Squeak and Aero the Acrobat, I believe.

Sure, but that's because of the regional lockout.

The Dashin' Desperadoes prototype uses some wierd split screen mode that will just show everything as a garbled mess if it's not set to PAL mode, and the opposite happens with the NTSC version. So this would be the only version you can play on an unmodded PAL MegaDrive.

Mirrored from 'Retro:

New ROMs!

Taken from the Virtual Console: Alien Soldier USA

Looks like they just changed both the region and the sound speed by modding the European ROM (the file is even called "AlienSoldier_Europe_USA.SGD"), but it's an official release anyway.


Byte 0xCEC changes the music tempo, by the way (60 for NTSC, 65 for PAL)



Also, from the European VC: Mega Turrican

This one's based on the US ROM, they removed the region lock, one of the splash screens and changed some text in the ending. Much stuff seems to have been moved inside the ROM, so they probably made a new build instead of hex-editing.


There's also a "patch" file inside the Alien Soldier directory, reflecting the changes made to the European ROM:

It's also present in Mega Turrican's, but it's empty in that case.


Now if somebody can point me to a place where to get the US VC release of Golden Axe 3, that will be the next one.

you probably can find it on Wiiso.com

You need to subscribe to the the VC section

Use that one
User: qwertywerty
pass: qwertywerty

Can't find it right now, I'm in a hurry, but I'll edit it if I found it before someone else does.

Now figure out how to switch pal mega cd games so the movies display correctly