PAL Famiclone Cartridges

[Retrospectives]

Thanks for sharing that information jpx72. Although I have never come across them myself, the PAL market of unofficial systems and games were huge. I suppose my researches mostly has gone into the NTSC market since that's where I'm from, but it makes sense due to the fact that a fair share of those educational computers were being PAL-Optimized or even PAL exclusives, who knows. What we do know is that China has the largest population in the world and that they are using PAL, and since many of these types of educational computers were from Subor it doesn't surprise me if they (or other companies) sold it to other PAL-markets as well.

[Wanderer]

Something came to mind - although it's not optimization for PAL, there are various sped up game hacks, like "Fast Pac-Man" for example, so there clearly have been pirate cartridges with the speed altered - if not actually optimized.

Seeing as there are clearly speed alterations that have been made, pirates optimizing a game for PAL doesn't sound too far fetched. Still no solid evidence though.

About the educational computers - alot were sold to Russia and Ukraine too (essentially PAL regions), with a Russian keyboard and (poorly) translated software. The menus can be counted as original software, but the BASIC interprets are either a bootlegs or hacks depending on which way you want to look at it. BASIC seems a good place to check for optimizations, and compare with the original Nintendo BASIC.

[P]

Seeing as there are clearly speed alterations that have been made, pirates optimizing a game for PAL doesn't sound too far fetched. Still no solid evidence though.

Yeah well I guess they may have sped up games once in a while, but I still think it's probably rare that they would bother speed up a game to it's proper speed (so that it has the same speed on a PAL machine as the original had on an NTSC one).

[Wanderer]

I agree that if it's been done, it's likely to be rare. Especially with games that had PAL NES releases it makes sense to just use a NES ROM.

It's still an interesting question though. I take it you have Family BASIC from your signature? Would you be up for a simple test and to compare results?

Even something as simple as this manually timed in seconds should show up a significant difference if it hasn't been optimized. Not very precise, but with the time it'd take the Famicom to process it, and if it hasn't been optimized, there'd be a big enough difference to see on a stopwatch.

FOR A = 1 to 10000     // Or a bigger number if we want to be more sure of the difference
NEXT
PRINT "Done"

[P]

Oh I see, manually measuring the speed with a stopwatch. Sure I could try.

[Wanderer]

On one of my PAL Keyboard Famiclones the above took approximately 7.3 seconds to complete.

I also tried FOR A = 1 to 30000, just in case the results are close, this should show up a bigger difference. It took approximately 21.08 seconds to complete.

For full disclosure the BASIC hack I used has 32k of RAM available, as opposed to Family BASIC's 4k (?), but for something like this I doubt the amount of RAM available makes a difference.

[fcgamer]

I want to bump this up.  Tonight I was sorting through some cartridges from my collection, and I came across one that had a label marked as "Super Mario USA", a pirate in a green shell.  I had gotten this maybe four years ago, had no idea what version of the game it contained, but immediately thought of this thread.  Loaded it up and to my disappointment it contained the PAL version of Super Mario Bros. 2, hacked as something like "Super Bros. 2" by a company called CTC IIRC.  So the search is on for a true pirate of Super Mario USA, I guess.