Sega Mega Drive: Which games were affected by 50hz slowdown?

Gamer Bhoy 89

I received my modded Mega Drive this morning complete with a 60hz switch on the back. This means I'm finally able to play some of the games that were really sluggish on the original console I had and I'm really happy with it, and now play the way they're meant to be played. It also removes the top & bottom borders that would slightly squash the picture into a stupid looking state, now they look like a proper 4:3 game

Here she is


I have a question though.

While Sonic the Hedgehog is the best known example of how a game is 20% slower on a 50hz signal, some of my games were barely different. Road Rash and NBA Jam played the same speed as they did in 50hz, (the proper screen size was the only difference) and it made me wonder;

Would anyone know where I can find a list of Mega Drive/Genesis games that are affected by 50hz? So far, the only games I've noticed that did improve in speed were Sonic 1, Flashback and Streets of Rage 1 & 2.

I'd be interested to see what other games suffered from 20% slowdown using 50hz.

o1s1n

It affects them all, apart from some later games that were PAL optimised (if you play PAL Alien Soldier for example in 60hz it plays faster than it should) - they're few and far between though.

The slowdown is just more noticeable in some games than others.

Just to be exact, its 17.5% slowdown

Retr0gamer

As o1s1n said it will affect every game you play. Just switch between 50 and 60 hz while you are playing them and see how unresponsive the controls get in 50 hz and how awful the music is. I've yet to see a PAL game other than Alien Soldier that was optimised for 50Hz but I'd imagine only very late Sega games were, sega were quite good to European gamers unlike Nintendo.

You probably won't notice it with something like Road Rash because the frame rate is about 12 FPS anyway so it barely makes a difference, you'll possibly get a 1-2 frame increase.

o1s1n

A lot of PAL optimized games have picture roll issues too when you switch them to 60hz. Off the top of my head it happens with Sonic 3, Samurai Showdown 2 and Virtual Racing.

Kind of annoying as it means the only way you can actually play them in 60hz with no boarders is to get an NTSC copy.

Gamer Bhoy 89

Thanks lads. Maybe it's because I haven't sat and played it properly in ages and just relied on emulators to even get a 60hz experience.

Can't wait to start buying more games for it. I've been on a drought for almost 2 years and I have Micro Machines 2 on the way now