NES on Famicom

[conrat4567]

OK, so hear me out. Can you play PAL/NTSC NES games on a famicom. I know it's lazy but I was just curious as I was once told that the NES had little to no change hardware wise to the famicom bar the obvious power differences but I may be wrong

[xIceMan]

NTSC NES games will 100% work with an adapter. Besides some certain games using PPU /A13 or VRAM /CE connectors but the adapter can be modified for supporting those as well, in case they do not.

PAL NES games may work but can have graphical or sound glitches, or do not run at all. Since they're running on a different clock speed.
But that's just a handful of games that may have bugs.

[P]

Internally an NTSC NES is almost identical to a Famicom. Same CPU, PPU and most other stuff. The biggest differences are the missing expansion audio feature, missing microphone and the added lockout chip. The NES also has some extra circuitry which adds some more input ports in the controller sockets (this is why a game like Chiller can use two Zappers which would not be possible on a Famicom without adding this circuitry to the Famicom). So yeah NTSC NES games will always work on Famicom unless they require something very special like two Zappers or the lockout chip.
When localizing Famicom games to North America, the games were normally not modified at all unless they needed to be translated or censored or so. There are even games like Stack Up which is just a Famicom cartridge board with a pin adapter inside the cartridge case.


The PAL NES however has a different CPU and PPU with a bunch of differences. The two biggest differences is that it runs on a slower clock which makes games run slower and the music in NTSC games will be a bit off, and that the graphics update time each frame is longer on PAL. Elite is a PAL exclusive that uses the longer graphics update time. This means it won't be able to finish updating the graphics in time on an NTSC system and therefore will look very glitchy to the point that it is unplayable.
Other smaller differences exists, for example the color emphasis bits are swapped for red and green. This means that Bubble Bobble for FDS, which enables red emphasis at all times, will have a green tint instead of a red tint if played on PAL. Games that uses color emphasis seems to be quite few though.
When localizing an NTSC game to PAL regions, they need to be modified for speed, pitch and such. Companies didn't always do that though so many PAL games runs slower and the music is off.

NTSC games generally works on PAL systems, although slower and the music is off, while NTSC systems may have problems running PAL games. Mostly games that use the longer longer graphics update time I suppose.