NES Smurfs NTSC conversion?

[nintendo2600]

Hey,

Is there a patch to make smurfs run properly on an NTSC machine? I know the PAL verison works with a disabled lockout but there are some serious graphical glitches.

Thanks,

N2600

[tepples]

A proper patch for this, Asterix, or any of several other PAL exclusives would probably have to rewrite the entire screen update system to unroll the VRAM transfer loops. Rare had to do this when porting Battletoads (E) to run on an NTSC system, and turning the screen on late was part of the solution.

[tokumaru]

A few PAL only games were programmed to take advantage of the much longer VBlank period PAL consoles have, which means that their video updating routines run past VBlank in NTSC machines, corrupting the display.

Getting these games to run on NTSC consoles is not an easy hack. Like tepples said, it's usually done with a combination of VRAM-update optimization and blanking some of the visible scanlines (either at the top or the bottom of the screen, or even both). To do that a person has to know the game very well, and each game is a different case.

So, I wouldn't count on having any of these games running on NTSC consoles anytime soon, unless someone with good knowledge of NES programming decides to dedicate some time to this.

[Dwedit]

Are you sure that PAL Battletoads came first? Gamefaqs and Wikipedia claim that it was released in early 1993 in Europe, but the copyright date in-game says 1991. If anything, I think the PAL version of Battletoads is a port of the NTSC version to reduce or eliminate the blank lines.
PAL Battletoads also still uses the same exact unrolled display update code.

[WJYkK]

Are you sure that PAL Battletoads came first?

According to Wikipedia, no, the North American NES game was released first.

[Bregalad]

The NA version came first, but Rare is based in England.

[nintendo2600]

Thanks for the replies. Looks like I'm stuck with corrupted Gargamel sprites then