Infrapink

I remember being jealous of how America and Japan always got games months or even years ahead of us, and hoarded some amazing games Luke EarthBound and Final Fantasy for themselves.

Oh, and when I was little, my aunt and uncle bought me The Adventures of Rad Gravity when they were in France, because they knew I liked games. I wasn’t able to play it because France was region B while Ireland got the UK overstock and so was region A.

But also, region locking was way less common than it might appear; as far as I know, the only consoles that had actual region locking were the 3DS and NES. What people now think of as region locking was actually a technological issue.

America and Japan use 60Hz AC electricity, while most of the rest of the world runs on 50Hz. Until the 2000s, CRT TVs’ refresh rates were hard-synched to the electrical frequency, and would not display properly if plugged into the wrong socket. The upshot of this was that an NTSC game, designed for 60Hz TVs, would physically not work in a PAL or SECAM console which operated at 50Hz and vice versa. This wasn’t specifically a game issue, by the way; VCRs and videos had the same compatibility issues.

In the DVD era, TVs started to appear which were compatible with 60Hz as well as 50Hz input. This was obviously handy for movies, which could be released as a single DVD all over the world. Video games started taking advantage of this; quite a few came with optional 60Hz modes, meaning you could play it slightly smoother and the way it was originally designed. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes caused a bit of a stir by operating in 60Hz mode only, so I and many others couldn’t even play it without upgrading our TVs.

Nowadays, of course, we don’t use PAL, SECAM, or NTSC; flat screen TVs can handle 60Hz input just fine, so games only need one version.

That’s not what emulation is. Emulators imitate hardware. WINE receives Windows system cells and returns the appropriate responses.