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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, many cool games never made it to the PAL region, and a lot of PAL ports (and video releases) got technically botched in some way.

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There's a sad bit of irony that the year is 2024 and the game console in your pocket could feasibly run anything you want, but the OEM region-locked it again.

I initially thought of my RG35XX+ when I read "the game console in your pocket" and thought "no, it's not region locked". Then I realized this was a discussion about iPhones and yes, they are region locked now.

But, FWIW, I've been really happy with acmeplus's beta of Batocera Linux on my RG35XX+. My son and I have been taking turns playing through old gems like Pokemon and Aladdin on it, and I'm hoping to finally beat Final Fantasy VII one of these days.

Most, if not all, emulators ignore / bypass region locking. I've yet to come across any emulator that strictly enforces it

Emulators using region-specific BIOS files can still have issues though.

Yeah, as a European retro game enthusiast I tend to avoid the PAL versions of anything older than the sixth gen of consoles like the plague.

By the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era most games were fine and PAL60 was becoming a thing anyway, but older than that and there’s a good chance the game just runs 17% slower due to the 50/60Hz difference, or has some weird letterboxing due to not accounting for 576 vs 480 lines.

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