[Sodaholic]

I couldn't find much of anything useful by Googling, so I figure you guys might know.

1. What rate does the Gameboy's screen update at? It's an LCD, so I have no idea if it would be 60hz, 50hz, 70hz, 40hz or whatever.
2. Does the NTSC Super Gameboy run the games at the exact same speed as a real Gameboy?
3. What is the Super Gameboy like in PAL regions? Does it have speed corrections, or does it just run at 5/6th the speed?

[SoullessSentinel]

I'm not sure on the refresh rates, but I do know that the Super Gameboy has a higher CPU clock speed than a Gameboy. The difference is only small, but it is enough to slightly effect the pitch of the sound and is because the Super Gameboy derives the processor clock from the SNES.

There was some speed run website that made playing on a Super Gameboy forbidden because it may offset the time of a full play through by a few seconds due to the speed increase.

[SpeedStarTMQ]

For speed differences, the best thing to do is compare, and we can do that with well known games:
PAL:


Now if you can find an NTSC version, or even compare on your Gameboy, you'll be able to work out any differences.

[LocalH]

Sodaholic, on 21 July 2013 - 06:29 AM, said:

I couldn't find much of anything useful by Googling, so I figure you guys might know.

1. What rate does the Gameboy's screen update at? It's an LCD, so I have no idea if it would be 60hz, 50hz, 70hz, 40hz or whatever.
2. Does the NTSC Super Gameboy run the games at the exact same speed as a real Gameboy?
3. What is the Super Gameboy like in PAL regions? Does it have speed corrections, or does it just run at 5/6th the speed?

According the the "Pan docs" as updated by nocash, here is a little information.

The Game Boy itself (and GBC as well, AFAIK) runs at a refresh rate of 59.73Hz. The SGB runs at 61.17Hz. So no, the NTSC SGB doesn't run games at the same speed as a regular GB (I don't say "real" as an SGB actually contains GB hardware). This difference in refresh rate is done by running the NTSC SGB CPU at a slightly faster rate than a regular GB (4.194304MHz for GB, 4.295454MHz for SGB).

I personally know nothing about the PAL SGB. However, based on this video of Pokemon Yellow running on an emulator, and comparing it with the PAL SGB video linked previously by SpeedStar, it appears to run at a similar speed rather than running at 5/6 speed. Not sure how the PAL SGB handles the frame rate difference, only way I can think of is by having choppy-ass scrolling, since GB games are closer to NTSC than PAL framerate. I'm going to assume that as far as the SGB hardware itself is concerned, the PAL and NTSC versions run at the same CPU speed and internal refresh rate, but I have no docs for that assumption.

I've also heard that the SGB2 runs games at the same speed as the GB, which would cause a bit of jumpy scrolling every so often as the framerates wouldn't match up. Never owned one so I can't speak to that, either.

This post has been edited by LocalH: 24 July 2013 - 04:13 PM

[TmEE]

PAL SGB runs the games at their "native" speed. I don't recall if the scrolling was choppy or there was tearing...