Heel
Member
This is a bit of a long rant, but if you're interested in playing PAL games on NTSC hardware this might be of interest.
I spent a few days trying to figure out how to get my PAL region PSX games working on my NTSC console and TV. There's some good news and some bad news, but mostly kind of bad news.
TL;DR it IS possible with some effort to patch the game discs to run on an NTSC console, but in the end it seems it's not really worth it as the games will at best be vertically stretched and cut off at the bottom, and at worst crash during video mode updates or run with poor timing. Unfortunately, best option for these is to just run on emulator on PC or obtain NTSC version of the game.
Here are some things I did that were reasonably successful:
- patching the first few sectors that identify game region using Set-RegionGUI - this makes the game at least get past the region lock, and is always handy to patch games across different NTSC regions as well (NA -> JP, etc)
- patching video mode code with Zapper2000 - this allows to update y-coordinates to place the video in a MOSTLY correct orientation on the screen, I never managed to get it to fully fit vertically without getting at least some cut-off at the bottom and generally vertically stretched image
I was TOTALLY unsuccessful in using any of the available boot discs, ImportPlayer, ImportPlayer Light, etc.
Most of them don't run on my PS2 (SCPH-70000 that supposedly has full PSX backwards compat), and even when I got one of them to boot up it would not actually load any other game discs. From what I was able to gather online none of them will do anything that the patches won't do, so I guess they're mostly handy in combination with existing modchips for running retail discs. In my case, I'm using a PS2 with mechapwn to boot the PSX backup discs, so I guess the bootdiscs wouldn't be all that useful.
I was mainly just hoping the screen adjustment some of these bootdiscs claim to provide would help with getting the image to fit my display properly, but was unable to test it as none of them seemed to work on a PS2. Regardless, from all other testing I did I doubt they would give enough of an improvement, but maybe I'll get around to testing with a boot disc on an actual PSX console at some point.
Patching the game images was also somewhat hit or miss, in the end I found Zapper2000 was better than something like PAL4U as the diff files it generates are plain text and can be easily edited by hand. This is useful as some of the patched areas can cause game crashes, so being able to go in and remove problematic patches while leaving others is a nice feature.
Also, for anyone embarking on this journey I recommend testing patched discs in emulator first, I was seeing the same behavior and screen shifting in Duckstation as I was on a real console, so it's better to iterate on PC rather than wasting CDRs.
In terms of TVs, I was able to get the games to run consistently and display on my CRT using composite, component and RGB - actual connector didn't seem to make a difference here. However, success on an LCD TV through HDMI was very low, only portions of some of the games would render on screen as the TV doesn't have support for PAL resolutions and was totally unable to cope with them for the most part. This will be very dependent on your TV though, but I would in general keep expectations very low in terms of TV compatibility, even if you manage to jump through all the right hoops in patching the game itself.
At least with the CRT I was also able to tweak VSIZE and VPOS variables in the service menu to get the picture to be NEARLY correct, but never FULLY correct, with at least some bits of image always missing at the bottom. Games could be playable this way for sure, but the experience would not be ideal.
Another disappointment was the NOPAL patch in popstarter. Being an emulator I was hoping this would be able to manage the video output in a cleaner fashion, but the image was severely shifted down and you'd need to patch the iso further or apply additional cheat codes on top to try and center the game. I didn't go very deep into this as wasting so much effort just to run these on an emulator on PS2 seemed kind of pointless.
I also noticed some timing issues during gameplay. This might be my imagination, but if you never played the game properly you might not even know it's not running right, so this would always be a worry with any of these setups.
So yeah, bottom line is PAL games on NTSC playstation seems like basically just asking to have a bad time. I will stick to JP and NA releases from now on I guess... and maybe this will save someone some headache trying to get this working in the future, and/or some money on buying PAL titles.
I spent a few days trying to figure out how to get my PAL region PSX games working on my NTSC console and TV. There's some good news and some bad news, but mostly kind of bad news.
TL;DR it IS possible with some effort to patch the game discs to run on an NTSC console, but in the end it seems it's not really worth it as the games will at best be vertically stretched and cut off at the bottom, and at worst crash during video mode updates or run with poor timing. Unfortunately, best option for these is to just run on emulator on PC or obtain NTSC version of the game.
Here are some things I did that were reasonably successful:
- patching the first few sectors that identify game region using Set-RegionGUI - this makes the game at least get past the region lock, and is always handy to patch games across different NTSC regions as well (NA -> JP, etc)
- patching video mode code with Zapper2000 - this allows to update y-coordinates to place the video in a MOSTLY correct orientation on the screen, I never managed to get it to fully fit vertically without getting at least some cut-off at the bottom and generally vertically stretched image
I was TOTALLY unsuccessful in using any of the available boot discs, ImportPlayer, ImportPlayer Light, etc.
Most of them don't run on my PS2 (SCPH-70000 that supposedly has full PSX backwards compat), and even when I got one of them to boot up it would not actually load any other game discs. From what I was able to gather online none of them will do anything that the patches won't do, so I guess they're mostly handy in combination with existing modchips for running retail discs. In my case, I'm using a PS2 with mechapwn to boot the PSX backup discs, so I guess the bootdiscs wouldn't be all that useful.
I was mainly just hoping the screen adjustment some of these bootdiscs claim to provide would help with getting the image to fit my display properly, but was unable to test it as none of them seemed to work on a PS2. Regardless, from all other testing I did I doubt they would give enough of an improvement, but maybe I'll get around to testing with a boot disc on an actual PSX console at some point.
Patching the game images was also somewhat hit or miss, in the end I found Zapper2000 was better than something like PAL4U as the diff files it generates are plain text and can be easily edited by hand. This is useful as some of the patched areas can cause game crashes, so being able to go in and remove problematic patches while leaving others is a nice feature.
Also, for anyone embarking on this journey I recommend testing patched discs in emulator first, I was seeing the same behavior and screen shifting in Duckstation as I was on a real console, so it's better to iterate on PC rather than wasting CDRs.
In terms of TVs, I was able to get the games to run consistently and display on my CRT using composite, component and RGB - actual connector didn't seem to make a difference here. However, success on an LCD TV through HDMI was very low, only portions of some of the games would render on screen as the TV doesn't have support for PAL resolutions and was totally unable to cope with them for the most part. This will be very dependent on your TV though, but I would in general keep expectations very low in terms of TV compatibility, even if you manage to jump through all the right hoops in patching the game itself.
At least with the CRT I was also able to tweak VSIZE and VPOS variables in the service menu to get the picture to be NEARLY correct, but never FULLY correct, with at least some bits of image always missing at the bottom. Games could be playable this way for sure, but the experience would not be ideal.
Another disappointment was the NOPAL patch in popstarter. Being an emulator I was hoping this would be able to manage the video output in a cleaner fashion, but the image was severely shifted down and you'd need to patch the iso further or apply additional cheat codes on top to try and center the game. I didn't go very deep into this as wasting so much effort just to run these on an emulator on PS2 seemed kind of pointless.
I also noticed some timing issues during gameplay. This might be my imagination, but if you never played the game properly you might not even know it's not running right, so this would always be a worry with any of these setups.
So yeah, bottom line is PAL games on NTSC playstation seems like basically just asking to have a bad time. I will stick to JP and NA releases from now on I guess... and maybe this will save someone some headache trying to get this working in the future, and/or some money on buying PAL titles.
but maybe is also worth noting that you can trick PAL games to run through NTSC-U GameShark as long as long as you launch and use it to boot the game, though it will cause the game to run at 60 FPS.
