Fix for Issues with Pal games in NTSC Video mode?

[EnclaveOverlord]

Hiya!

I was wondering if anyone knew a way to fix the plethora of issues that crop up with some specific PAL games when running the Xbox in NTSC mode? For example, Darkwatch cutscenes have stutter, so I tried replacing the video files and that didn't seem to work, so I replaced the XBE with an NTSC one and while that fixed the cutscenes, it made the game run fast. Other issues I couldn't even begin to try and fix were weird aspect ratio issues with Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, and immediate crash on starting a new game with Evil Dead Regeneration. I'm kinda a noob at this so I'm struggling a bit, and was kinda hoping there's some simple fix I was missing (Other than buying NTSC copies of said games, I would if the shipping costs weren't horrendous for us in NZ).

Anyway, any help would be appreciated.

[Coldly-Indifferent]

In the majority of cases PAL Xbox games natively support NTSC use too. Just swap the Xbox to NTSC using the Enigmah Region Changer app not any other dashboard NTSC settings. You should be good for the majority of games.

Of course there are exceptions.

Darkwatch PAL, I don't have because I imported the US NTSC version at the time. Never had a problem with the cut scenes or anything else. But I've never heard of cut scenes running too fast for any region version of any game. That's odd.

It sounds as if you're playing them from original disc rather than installed to the HDD so my suggestion would be that the DVD drive might be becoming a problem. Try test installing one the games to the HDD using DVD2Xbox and see if the problem persists. If DVD2Xbox throws up any errors either the disc itself or the DVD drive will most likely be the cause.

Weird aspect ratio problems with some games: the Xbox game widescreen support is iffy and in a lot of cases it is not true WS but the NTSC 'hybrid' 3:2 rather than 16:9. But there are games which do weird display things if you use WS; one of the GTAs (Vice City I think) did that.

Try swapping to 'Normal' ie. 4:3 and see if that resolves such 'formatting' problems.

[EnclaveOverlord]

Thanks for replying

I've realised from your response that I was probably a little too vague with my explanation of my issues, sorry about that.

So what I meant with Darkwatch was that the game was running fast when I replaced the XBE, not the cutscenes (Though I want to test it again to make sure of that).

Funnily enough I was running games from the discs about a week ago (because putting in discs makes me nostalgic), but I recently gave in to installing them to the HDD because of the issues I had been having, so the XBE's should be getting patched by DVD2Xbox.

As for the aspect ratio issues, it's not like their stretched, but more that part of the image in games like Dark Alliance seems to get cut off. I tried moving the image with my Retrotink 5x, as you can pretty freely mess with the aspect ratio stuff with that, but it seems like the bit of the image that gets cut off is actually gone when playing, not just hidden off screen.

Edit: Just a bit of an update, I managed to fix issues with all the EA Lord of the Rings games, Darkwatch, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and Time Splitters 2 by replacing the problem files with their NTSC copy counterparts, I also fixed Crazy Taxi 3's sound issues the same way, but those issues were unrelated to playing the games at 480p. I am still unable to fix Halo: Combat Evolved and Evil Dead Regeneration though

[Dagoth_Ur]

I have a PAL console and had no luck running a PAL retail disc of Enter The Matrix on NTSC video (immediate crash with black screen) and when I changed back to PAL video mode it would get to moment the first level starts then crash with a black screen, Enter The Matrix and probably some other games just don't play nicely with modded consoles and their flexible or unlocked video modes. In fact I couldn't even install PAL Enter The Matrix onto my PAL console's HDD! I had to use the disc to test.

But I got the NTSC-U version of Enter The Matrix installed on my HDD and left it on the NTSC video mode I was originally using (for 480p+), there were no crashes and I could load up the and play the first few levels.

Update: found you can just get a patched NTSC-U .XBE once your PAL game is installed, and swap it out for the PAL .XBE. This remedied some unplayable PAL games for me that had no 480p patch (Timesplitters 2 for instance) and without stopping me from using my PAL save data which would happen if I installed a whole NTSC-U version of a game opposed to just a patched NTSC-U .XBE.

Also DVD2Xbox will apparently try patch a game being installed to the HDD, based on what the BIOS video mode is set to in Enigmah video switcher. If installing PAL games, can help to set video mode back to interlaced blurry PAL whilst installing those PAL titles.

[Tom M.]

You will not be able to "fix" PAL version of Halo 1. That was specifically coded for 50 Hz PAL back in the day I had the original copy. Just use NTSC version instead, it runs much smoother anyway.

In general, as said above, most PAL games support PAL-60 Hz, so should run fine on NTSC, provided the cutscenes were not recoded to 25 fps which I doubt...