So, I just got a Framemeister and am about to take the plunge on SNES, but I haven't decided yet whether to buy PAL or NTSC-US.

Yes, yes, I know. Buy an American SNES, it is way better, right? Well, for various reasons I would much prefer to have a PAL SNES sitting on my shelf, but here's my problem: For the life of me I can't find a list detailing which SNES PAL-ports are good and which are bad. With "good" I mean that the developers adjusted game speed so it plays as fast on 50 Hz as it did on 60 Hz, and that they accounted for the slightly higher resolution so that the screen isn't squooshed together. Also, I think some bad PAL ports had issues with audio timing, with the game and the audio running out of sync since they ran at different speeds?

I know that some games had this extra work put into them, making the PAL version play and look and sound like it should, and so I went to Google confident that such a list "must" exist somewhere, but if it does then I've just wasted three afternoons looking for it, and not finding it.

Does anybody know? (Yes I know that all this would cease to be a problem if I just bought a US SNES, but like I said, for various reasons ...)

I'd guess your problem with the US SNES is mostly the look of the system? I got a Japanese Super Famicom when I went down that road. Solves the PAL/ NTSC problem, the console looks the same as the PAL equivalent and the games were usually far cheaper than their UK and US versions I found (Though that part might not still be true, it was a few years ago I was building a decent SNES collection)

Obviously, the language can be a problem but that depends on what you are wanting to play, Obviously disregard the idea if you are wanting to play RPGs but for Mario, Donkey Kong Country and the like it's fine.

Doesn't really answer your question on the quality of the ports, but could be something to consider!

As someone who lived through the era (and several terrible porting eras after it... no wonder we all gravitated towards PCs and microcomputers - yes they had bad ports and iffy selections at times but so did our consoles!) I'd say that not only are most PAL ports bad from back then but also not all the games you think of as classics even got released so why get original hardware that can't play every game you want to play and will play the ones it can as a worse versions.

If you think about, how much work could they even do if the game was built with hand-drawn frames of animation and was reliant on that 60Hz update rate? You can either drop frames to produce a stuttering animation or play them all back and get a slowdown; you can't redraw every anim loop using a different number of frames without having to completely re-art the game. The serious answer to this issue came when games started just including PAL-60 (PAL signal but 60Hz refresh) support as TVs moved to work with more than the mains-locked 50Hz refresh rate. But I'll still have to check as recent as PS2-era games for which version I want to actually play of a game I have on my shelf (which is also a good time to see if someone has made a hex-edit for widescreen support on 4:3 3D games, but this is straying from the original question).

I'm going to say...maybe the Donkey Kong country games, and that's kind of it?

For what it's worth, the region locking is very, very easy to circumvent. You can do it with literal tweezers.

Most pal snes games suck in 50hz and are more expensive than the us version. Only reason I'd go for pal is if youd want to play on a 50hz crt tv. I have a pal snes and of the 50 games I own theres maybe 4 that dont look horribly squished and run 10% slower. Most soundtracks you already know from the era will sound wrong as well at -10% speed. Afaik barely any games got adapted properly for pal.

I would seriously look into getting a mod chip installed that allows you to switch between 50/60 Hz and also disables the lockout mechanism. Something like this, for example.

With this installed you can buy any game from any region and run them at their intended speed. The unoptimized nature of most PAL ports is now actually a blessing in disguise as they will run at full speed on a 60Hz console. You need an RGB SCART adapter as well to display 60Hz games but I assume that's something you already have anyway.

I also lived through the era and (with a mod chip) the PAL/NTSC problem was pretty much a non-issue.

@condroid: I just ordered a PAL SNES with that mod installed. It seems like the best of both worlds: I can play original Europe-released games in a much nicer-looking European SNES, and they will all run like the NTSC versions in 60Hz! In the rare instances where the PAL version is optimized properly, I'll switch the console to 50Hz, and Rob's yer father's brother.

I have a hard time accepting that it would be as impossible to optimize as Shivoa claims. If the animation is tied to refresh rate, surely it's just a matter of coding that "this frame of animation should last for 5 refresh-frames, instead of 6".

@joques: The problem is that you basically need the timing on everything to be a factor of 6 for that to work cleanly. If you have to round off numbers to deal with trying to adjust, say, a 5 frame event to be 5/6ths of 5 frames, things will probably get weird. It's entirely possible that a solution like that could even introduce bugs that don't exist otherwise.

I must say, I am curious to know if you've found any examples of PAL optimised games that don't just run slower yet.

Damn I should get myself one of those modchips. I used to be against modifying consoles in any way or form back when I got my snes but honestly it seems almost dumber not to do it in case of PAL hardware.....

Not getting a US SNES because of how terrible it looks is a perfectly sound reason for not getting one.
My god that thing is hideous.

That being said, I feel your pain as I also had to deal with bad PAL conversions for many years, 50/60Hz TVs and of course the other common issue of games simply not being released in PAL regions.
Your modded console solution seems ideal to me.