Playing PAL games on NTSC consoles

[gbpxl]

I have read that it is possible to play a PAL Mega Drive cart on an NTSC Genesis via the Game Genie. Has anyone confirmed this? And also, if the refresh rate for PAL games are different than the NTSC counterparts, is the video going to be all screwed up?

[Mayhem]

The region lock afaik is in the cartridges not the console, and didn't appear until 1993. So any PAL cart before then should play okay. Yes, may be a bit different if it was optimised to run on PAL or not.

[Gameguy]

For some Euro PAL releases, they weren't actually optimized for PAL in the first place and actually play properly on NTSC hardware while they have issues playing on PAL hardware from the region they were released in.

Some games play fine without needing a Game Genie, other's need a Game Genie to bypass the lockout, and some games won't work even with the Game Genie. It really depends on the game.

[gbpxl]

Im wanting to play Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament on a Model 1 Genesis. The game is only available in PAL format AFAIK, but didnt want to buy it if the picture or sounds going to be f***ed up

[Gameguy]

Im wanting to play Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament on a Model 1 Genesis. The game is only available in PAL format AFAIK, but didnt want to buy it if the picture or sounds going to be f***ed up
Just a heads up, there's also an updated version of that, Micro Machines Turbo Tournament '96, which also includes a few more features. They may or may not have the same tracks, information online about this varies and I don't own the games to confirm this first hand. Someone claims the non-updated version has better tracks.

I can't seem to find info online about how import friendly this specific title is, but it's actually a game I've been hoping to find someday. I liked the first Micro Machines quite a bit.

You can check if it's region locked or not by playing the ROM in an emulator, just force it to specific regions in the emulator and see how the game responds to that. For what it's worth, from checking online finding various lists of Genesis/Mega Drive Game Genie lockout codes, I can't find any listed for that Micro Machines game. Most likely that's because it doesn't need a code to bypass any region locking.

Here's a link to a list of codes for various games, which might help with other future imports. I can't guarantee that it's fully complete but it's pretty extensive.
http://www.angelfire.com/games2/codehut/RegionalBypassGG.txt

I don't know if there are any issues with the game running on 60Hz, I haven't seen any mention of problems though.