Playing Famicom games on PAL CRT ?

[casino]

Hi,

I live in Czech Republic and I just got back from my Japan trip today, and seeing that some of the famicom games are still quite cheap got me thinking about getting small CRT, Famicom and few cartridges. I don't care about ultra sound/video accuracy, I just want to play my games at 60hz with no lag.

Is anybody here running similiar setup to this ? Looks like i have only two options.

1. Buying AV moded Famicom, but apparently most PAL CRTs can handle NTSC signal only via RGB SCART. So this probably isn't a vaild option for me ?

2. Famiclones - Are there any PAL famiclones that run the games on the original 60hz speed ? Looks like there is quite a few being sold on aliexpress but I am not sure about their quality.

Again, it doesn't have to by anything fancy that has 100% compability. I do most of my gaming via emulation so this would be just something to play around with during cozy winter nights.

Thanks for any advice !

Edit: Just looked thorugh my profile here and apparently I was thinking about the same thing 11 year ago :Ｄ

[P]

1. RGB is not NTSC. NTSC, PAL and SECAM are 3 variants of composite video which are 3 types of color encoding of the video signal (for broadcast reasons). RGB means colors are not encoded at all and is therefore universal (as long as you have a TV with an RGB connector). The Famicom's video hardware only outputs composite though not RGB.

You will need an AV-modded Famicom (or the AV Famicom or Twin Famicom since they both have composite out) anyway because the original Famicom only offers RF (which is an NTSC composite video signal modulated into a radio frequency signal) which means you need a Japanese RF-demodulator to demodulate it into NTSC composite. Even American NTSC TV-sets sometimes have problems with Japanese RF, and PAL TV-sets absolutely does not support it AFAIK, this is true even for PAL TV-sets that fully supports NTSC composite through the AV connectors.

But yeah NTSC composite will still not work as is on most CRT PAL TV-sets. Many CRT PAL TV-sets do support 60 Hz, but not the NTSC color decoding so the picture will display correctly but in black & white in such cases.
If your TV only supports 50 Hz the picture will be totally unwatchable, it's not a matter of running the game in the wrong speed, it will be 100% unplayable.

It should be possible to convert NTSC into 60 Hz RGB (with some quality loss) but I'm not aware of any such adapters. The French NES actually do this because it was cheaper than making a SECAM NES and Frenchmen usually had RGB SCART already back then (SCART is a French invention).

There are NTSC<>PAL-adapters though, they are not perfect but they may work good enough for you. I guess they may require a 60 Hz PAL TV if they only decode the NTSC colors into PAL colors. Converting 60 Hz to 50 Hz isn't possible without some sort of timing issue.



2. Most classic Famiclones like Dendy and Pegasus are actually PAL with some things in common with the NTSC Famicom/NES. I think modern NOAC Famiclones are also based on those and has the same faults.
I don't really have any personal experience with Famiclones myself though.