N64 ROM region patcher needed (NTSC to PAL)

Includes but not limited to: SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Game Gear and I guess the Virtual Boy.

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Lady Eklipse
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N64 ROM region patcher needed (NTSC to PAL)

Post by Lady Eklipse » Thu Jan 26, 2012 2:35 pm

Greetings, everyone!
I'm a happy owner of a 64drive and two N64s: a regular PAL British model and a French PAL N64 modded to output RGB.
I play mostly NTSC roms for obvious reasons. They all work fine, but I run into problems with some NTSC games when running them in RGB.
On this french model all PAL games work fine.
NTSC games also mostly work fine, but some of them (apparantly those
which have some pre-rendered intro scenes) have glitches: the TV
produces a popping sound, the screen is black and the sound is one
second present - one second silent (I think the TV is trying to switch
modes but fails).
I have tried those NTSC games on another TV - CRT one, they work fine,
both PAL and NTSC.
These games are:
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Star Wars: Episode 1 racer
Perfect Dark
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
Vigilante
Top Gear Rally
and some others as well, but I hope you get the idea.

I know that most likely my LCD TV is a problem (SAMSUNG LE32C30), but
the problem really depends on a game and isn't present when using
their PAL counterparts.

I have played around a little more with my french RGB-ready N64 and
64drive and found out that some patched ROMS from GoodN64 work fine:
Space Invaders (U) [f1] (PAL).z64 worked
Vigilante 8 (U) [f2] (PAL).z64 worked
BUT
Vigilate 8 (U) [f1] (PAL).z64 ran into the same problem I described.

From this I can conclude that there exists a patch fixing my problem,
though I have troubles finding it on the Internet. Does anyone of you know how is
it called or have link to it?

Thanks in advance for anyone reading and replying to this.
Lady Eklipse.

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sanni
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Re: N64 ROM region patcher needed (NTSC to PAL)

Post by sanni » Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:01 pm

There is a program called paladin you could try. With it you have different options how to patch a rom to another region. For example you can just disable the region lock or even convert the videomode from ntsc to pal, afaik there are some audio bugs when you convert a 30hz game to 25hz.

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Lady Eklipse
Posts:30
Joined:Thu Feb 17, 2011 4:57 am

Re: N64 ROM region patcher needed (NTSC to PAL)

Post by Lady Eklipse » Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:06 am

Thank you for your reply!
I have patched most of problematic games I care about with the command:
paladin /m name.z64
which means I've just converted videotables to MPAL.
But alas, some games are too stubborn for some reason:
Donkey Kong 64 refuses to run at all.
Spider-Man and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1, 2, 3 seem to "ignore" the patch applied and behave the same as before.
Paladin also has a /f command which is said to do the country-check fix, but it doesn't work for me.
Also I have patched Indiana Jones and Star Wars: Battle for Naboo (both LucasArt games apparently), and these two games work almost OK, but sometimes the screen blinks for a fraction of second and gets the picture again (as if my TV is still struggling with incorrect modes changing).

From this I conclude, that Paladin is a good program, but it still leaves something behind.
Is there anything that can possibly help me?

Thank you again for your help!

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