Why do (E) snes roms run faster than (U) or (J) roms?

NorseChief

New member
A short while ago I was trying to figure out why my roms were running too fast without auto frame rate enabled. So I posted on here asking if snes emulators had a problem with GeForce 8800 GT cards.

I recently made a breakthrough when i realised that (E) snes roms run faster than (U) or (J) roms.

If I use just the (U) and (J) roms on ZSNES then the games run perfectly smoothly without any choppiness... even with auto frame rate enabled.

However I have a problem if I try running (E) roms on ZSNES because they run too fast and the movement is choppy if you try make it run at normal speed. It looks like all (E) snes roms run at 50 fps at normal speed. Now why is this?

So does this mean that (E) roms are not compatible with my graphics card or what? Can somebody please explain to me why there would be a difference? I am a little fuzzy on these differences that imo shouldn't be there in the first place.
 

FatTrucker

Abusus non tollit usum
(E) Roms are European releases which would be in PAL format. Those PAL games ran natively at 50hz (with borders) because that's the TV standard over here PAL TV's have 625 'lines' and NTSC have 525 'lines' meaning a 525 line game looks squashed when displayed on a PAL TV, which is why PAL games all had borders at the top and bottom where NTSC displayed fullscreen.

(U) US roms by comparison run on the NTSC standard (fullscreen 60hz) which was the standard for TV's in the US.

Should make no difference when emulating though as the emulator should compensate on its own. I've tried on my system and can't duplicate your problem so it seems possibly related to your hardware or OS.

It does beg the question though, if your US and Jap games run fine, why would you worry about the European versions?. I can't be absolutely sure but I don't think we had many/any exclusive titles released over here other than possibly some Foreign Language translations.
 
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