Is it possible to play pal games on gen plus preview 3

InternetAddict · Post by **InternetAddict** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 1:17 am

I tryed bare knuckle 3 japan version and I got message only for use on secam mega drive thing or whatever?

Post by **Quzar** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 2:44 am

im pretty sure that the region guessing is slightly off in it. i cant verify that though.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 4:48 am

Yeah, the region guessing is a little buggy.

The way it works is that it scans the ROM header to see which regions are supported, and then chooses the highest ranked one. There are three region settings - US (US first, then Jap, then PAL), PAL (PAL first, then US, Then Jap), and Japanese (Jap first, then US, then PAL). The DC version was built with the US region setting, so it should switch to a PAL region if the ROM header claims to only support that.

And there's the problem. If the ROM claims to support US or Japanese, but it really only supports PAL systems, the emulator guesses wrong, and the game refuses to run...

I could probably tweak it a little to make it guess better. Earlier versions didn't guess at all - they used the first region in the ROM header. That worked on most games, including some that the guessing system doesn't work on, but had a similar problem on other games. And a lot of games were always in Japanese, even if you didn't want them to be...

impact135 · Post by **impact135** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 5:54 am

ive got an idea i dont know if this is gonna work or not so just hear me out..

Ok... so you know how on the computer emulators you can pick say USA , or japan or europe..

ok.. so have the auto load thing thats great.. but also maybe you could put an option so you can pick the region in case the rom refuses to load based on region.

NOw im not saying that i want to have to pick the region every time i try a game but maybe have it in an options menu or something.. like say load rom automatically.. or you could choose to do it manually and pick your region if the rom doesnt load right.

i have not really encountered this problem yet.. so im just trying to give out some helpful advise to help others.

ethoscapade · Post by **ethoscapade** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 2:24 pm

bare knuckle 3 (along with wily wars and golden axe 3) actually have region lockout, AFAIK. it shouldn't be just a PAL issue.

impact135 · Post by **impact135** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 4:23 am

you can bypass the region lockout for golden axe 3 and willy wars by using simple ips patches for those games. the region it changes to is usa of course though so if your in another country dont expect this solution to work for you.

Dutchdude · Post by **Dutchdude** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 5:08 am

But even if the emu supports pal games it doesn't mean that the TV signal is 50Hz, however I hope that the first public release will have a PAL/NTSC switcher.

DcSteve · Post by **DcSteve** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:46 am

would it be possible for the user to have the option to change the region settings manually, by including them into the gui somehow..

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 6:49 pm

Yep. Actually, I was going to attatch the region detection code the the ROM database. So, rather than relying on the ROM header to tell us which regions a particular game supports, we can just use the ROM database. That should fix virtually everything, and then the detection order and refresh rate should be separately configurable.

DcSteve · Post by **DcSteve** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:01 pm

nice... well ive got some good news, chui has got the sh4 68k cpu working, and now he is debugging it because it hangs occasionally.. as soon as thats done... well, i wont jinx anything..