Force NTSC "problem" in Lufia II - audio not in sy

Svenshinhan · Post by **Svenshinhan** » Thu May 19, 2011 7:29 pm

I'm trying to play the PAL version of Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals because the US NTSC version has some graphical glitches that have been fixed in the PAL versions.

But the slower PAL speed in SNES games kind of annoys me, so I thought I might just play the PAL version and have the emulator force NTSC so it plays at the same speed.

Using two instances of Snes9x, 1 loading the NTSC version and one the PAL, I noticed that the video is indeed in perfect sync (both running at the exact same speed) during the first part of the intro. However after that, when it cuts to a shot of the world map with a different background score, the PAL version seems to have slower audio (the same speed as in regular PAL mode).

The video is still running at a faster rate.

What happens is that, because of the sped-up video, the game waits for the music to reach certain parts before continuing with the intro (and of course this doesn't happen in the NTSC version of the game). Yet it doesn't do this in the first part of the intro, when both versions run exactly parallel to each other.

I'm not even sure this is an actual problem with the emulator, but can this be fixed?

Running the latest Snes9x version, but I've tried some older ones too. The ROMS are both good and working perfectly (I've completed the game several times on both).

If there's no solution I'll just go with the NTSC version and its bugs, but if at all possible I'd like to know how to have the audio running at the appropriate speed when forcing a PAL rom to play in NTSC mode.

the_randomizer · Post by **the_randomizer** » Thu May 19, 2011 7:41 pm

Most PAL games were never optimized to run at NTSC speeds, hence the slow audio, which is roughly 18% slower than the NTSC version. There's nothing that can be changed in the emulator's code to get around this.

Svenshinhan · Post by **Svenshinhan** » Thu May 19, 2011 7:49 pm

Alright, guess I'll just take the graphical glitches in the US version for granted like I always have then. Thanks for the fast reply!

Still don't get why only a part of the game seems to have this issue, though. Oh well.

SparroHawc · Post by **SparroHawc** » Fri May 20, 2011 12:38 am

My guess is that the PAL version of the game had some programming changes to take into account the slower speed, but not all of it. The primary issues where you'll run into trouble is where the game is expecting the music to be synched up with what's going on with the visuals - like intros, as you discovered. A majority of the game probably doesn't care how fast the music's going, so it'll just run on a per-cycle basis instead of trying to time things appropriately.