So why did I bother with all that faff and pissing about with my cranky old SNES? Well as I said back in part 1, I did it mainly for shits ‘n giggles, as I simply fancied the challenge of doing it. The other main reason was to play the games in the best quality possible, and how they were intended to be played, in terms of screen size, picture quality and speed. So does it really make that much of a difference? Was it worth it? Yes, I definitely think so, here’s some photos I took to hopefully show this

For all the pictures you are best clicking the thumbnail to view full size, then use the “prev” and “next” buttons to skip between the 50hz and 60hz versions to really see the differences.

A couple of comments:

On the 60hz images, it looks a lot better on the TV, the camera shows up some dithering which I can’t notice when viewing with my eyes
On the full-screen shots, I’ve drawn in red lines showing where the top & bottom of my TV is, i.e. where the screen stops and meets the bezel. It’s hard to spot otherwise as the TV bezel is black like most flat screens.
Yes I’m playing the games in 16:9 mode on the TV, so it’s being stretched. Now before you throw your arms up in horror, it’s just for the photos as it shows up the differences slightly better

Donkey Kong Country 2

A rather well known game, I picked this random but it seemed to show up the 50hz “dithering” problem rather well.

Donkey Kong Country 2 – Title screen at 50hz	Donkey Kong Country 2 – Title screen at 60hz
Donkey Kong Country 2 – In game 50hz	Donkey Kong Country 2 – In game 60hz
Donkey Kong Country 2 – 50hz with big nasty borders	Donkey Kong Country 2 – 60hz the borders are gone

Yoshi’s Island

An all time classic, a real gem in the SNES catalogue. Let’s see it in its full glory as Nintendo intended.

Yoshi’s Island – 50hz close up	Yoshi’s Island – 60hz close up
Yoshi’s Island – 50hz full screen with borders	Yoshi’s Island – 60hz still some borders but much less

Other games

It’s not all roses however. Many PAL games detect the console is in 60hz mode and think they are playing on a Japanese or US machine, and stop the game running. Donkey Kong Country puts up a rather OTT message in this situation. That’s not a big problem – switch the machine on in 50hz mode, once it’s past the check (which is normally at game startup) switch over to 60hz, haha! Sadly some PAL games however suffer from glitches or are unplayable in 60hz mode. StarWing is a total mess with a huge chunk of the screen glitched out, Super Mario world and Super Mario Kart are playable but suffer some graphical issues.