[Black Squirrel]

For years people have wanted a list:

http://segaretro.org...rive_cartridges

I've started one. Please finish it.

This inlcudes:
- Games which put up a "YOU CAN'T PLAY THIS" screen when run in the wrong region
- Games which run in the wrong region but are broken and/or unplayable
- Games which run too fast/too slow
- Games which are part-optimised for PAL consoles (e.g. only the music is sped up)
- Games which are "fully" optimised for PAL consoles (and use 240 lines instead of 224)

Similar lists will need to happen for Saturn and Dreamcast games, but this is maybe the most pressing because region locking and optimisation is horrendously inconsistent on the Mega Drive.

Fix things, add things, whatever.

[Pirate Dragon]

It should be easy enough to find out which games are region locked for which regions via changing the region in an emulator. Incidentally, it was widely reported at the time that the Japanese release of Rolling Thunder 2 (1991-11-19) was the first game to be region locked.

http://segaretro.org..._03.pdf&page=67

That should eliminate quite a few of these;

http://sega.jp/fb/se...rd/md/soft.html
http://sega.jp/fb/se...t_licensee.html

This post has been edited by Pirate Dragon: 28 July 2016 - 02:18 PM

[Black Squirrel]

I suspect some emulators are a bit too good when it comes to handling regions. A 240-line PAL game running on an NTSC machine should be burning your retinas with wacky flickering and scrolling issues, but on Kega Fusion at least, that doesn't happen - the game breaks in other ways (or at least Super Skidmarks does).

(although it's still fairly obvious when it doesn't work)

[Black Squirrel]

Pirate Dragon, on 28 July 2016 - 02:08 PM, said:

Incidentally, it was widely reported at the time that the Japanese release of Rolling Thunder 2 (1991-11-19) was the first game to be region locked.

Exciting fun fact: the Japanese version is indeed region locked, but the others are region free. So you could have imported a US cart at the time and beat the official release by more than a year!

This post has been edited by Black Squirrel: 29 July 2016 - 10:36 AM

[Neo]

The European version of Fun 'N' Games doubled (!) the speed of the player character in the Mouse Maze minigame, turning an otherwise boring slog into a fun hectic diversion. But the game has loads of version differences beyond that so I don't know how you'd count it.

[mentski]

Streets of Rage 2 - The US cart won't run on a JP or PAL MD, and the JP/PAL carts (which contain the same multi-language ROM image and is one of the rare carts that got a unique Asia release) won't work on a US Genny. That was the first cart I ever owned with a lockout I think.


The US version of Shadow of the Beast is unoptimised for NTSC and runs too fast, that was fixed for the JP release (they updated the graphics, too...)


I think some other Psygnosis games were like that, too - I'm pretty sure the US version Fatal Rewind ran too fast on NTSC machines, but I'm not sure if that was fixed like Beast was when it was released in Japan as The Killing Game Show.

Quote

Exciting fun fact: the Japanese version is indeed region locked, but the others are region free. So you could have imported a US cart at the time and beat the official release by more than a year!

Yup, I remember that, I had the US copy. Did it really take pver a year to get a PAL release? I didn't notice... heh.

This post has been edited by mentski: 31 July 2016 - 07:27 AM

[ICEknight]

In case that somebody also wants to document how PAL games behave on NTSC systems when the country lock is removed, this topic may come in handy.

This post has been edited by ICEknight: 31 July 2016 - 10:06 AM

[Black Squirrel]

I can confirm Fatal Rewind runs too fast in both the US and Japan.