Can I overclock a PAL NES to NTSC speed?

[Erik_Twice]

Because playing cetain PAL games are painful.

[NintendoLegend]

I am not sure if it is possible.

[ ... wow. I am completely unhelpful. My bad. ]

[Satoshi_Matrix]

That's an interesting question. Since it's usually possible to overclock the NTSC 2A03 to 50% and beyond it's default 1.79Mhz, it should be relitively simple to overclock the PAL 2A07's 1.66Mhz to 17% faster to match the 2A03.

That said, the PAL NES CPU not only had different clock cycles, but also different audio cycles. It was designed to run in 50Hz. I'm not sure what effect adding a crystal to overclock it would have on PAL games.

If you try it, be sure to let me know the results.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Asked a friend to confirm, and yeah, you can overclock a PAL NES sure, but that won't make it NTSC. Remember, many PAL NES games were designed specifically for the slower clockspeed, so if you change that it'll just raise the pitch of the audio and make timing-sensitive games glitchy.

Being a 50Hz console, even lockout chip disabled and clock speed changed to 1.79Mhz, NTSC software would still run like crap (but the sound pitch may become correct).

To convert a PAL NES into an NTSC one so you get full speed without glitches (for NTSC games only) you'd need to completely replace the CPU, PPU and XTAL with those from a North American NES. But if you were to do that, you might as well just import yourself an NTSC NES. PAL XTAL is 26.601712 MHz and NTSC XTAL is 21.477272 MHz. If you replace those parts you'll be good to go.....in America.

The bottom line being that PAL games are a mess that you either have to live with or instead go with their North American counterparts.

In fact, PAL compatible clone NES systems are better than Nintendo's own design. For example, Dendy (PAL/SECAM systems sold in countries like Iceland, Finland and Russia) were designed to be closer to NTSC and thus more compatible with NTSC software.

NTSC games on Dendy run slightly slower but with correct sound pitch and almost no glitching, while NTSC games on a PAL NES run like utter shit (lower sound pitch, glitches galore)

http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_ ... difference
you can see how Dendy PAL is much closer to NTSC than Nintendo PAL.