Can You Play PAL ROMs on the Anbernic RG35XX Without Lag?

Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

The Short Answer: Yes, But It Depends Which Version You Have

Let me give you the answer upfront, because I know that’s why you’re here. Yes, you can play PAL ROMs on the Anbernic RG35XX without meaningful lag — but the experience varies quite a bit depending on which version of the RG35XX you own, which firmware you’re running, and crucially, whether you’ve taken five minutes to configure things properly. If you’ve just dropped some PAL ISOs onto a stock card and expected everything to feel right, there’s a decent chance you’ve been playing at the wrong refresh rate without even realising it.

I’ve been testing PAL ROMs on various RG35XX variants over the past several months — the original RG35XX, the RG35XX Plus, and the RG35XX H — and the results are genuinely interesting. Not just technically, but historically. Because the question of PAL performance on emulation hardware isn’t new. It’s a question that British and European gamers have been quietly furious about for thirty-five years. We got slower games, black borders, and a fraction of the software library that North America enjoyed, and most of us didn’t even know it was happening. The fact that we’re still asking whether PAL will run properly in 2025 is, honestly, a bit funny if you’re feeling charitable, and quietly maddening if you’re not.

This piece covers everything you need to know: what PAL actually does to emulation, how the RG35XX hardware handles it, what firmware settings make the real difference, and what the broader picture looks like for British retro gamers trying to play their childhood libraries exactly as they remember them — for better or worse.

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What PAL Actually Is (And Why It Still Matters in 2025)

If you grew up playing games in the UK, you grew up in PAL territory. PAL — Phase Alternating Line — was the broadcast television standard used across most of Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. It runs at 50Hz, meaning fifty fields per second, as opposed to NTSC’s 60Hz used in North America and Japan. This difference exists because European mains electricity runs at 50Hz, and early television hardware was built around it. Simple enough. But the knock-on effects for gaming were significant, long-lasting, and honestly quite damaging to an entire generation’s experience of the medium.

When a game was developed in Japan or the United States, it was built around a 60Hz display. The game logic — enemy movement speeds, character velocity, music tempo, everything — was tied to that 60Hz refresh cycle. When publishers ported those games to PAL hardware, they had two options. The right option was to retime everything for 50Hz: slow the game logic down proportionally, adjust the music, rebalance the physics. The easy option was to just run the same code on a 50Hz display, which made the game run at 83.3% of its intended speed. Slower. Clunkier. Noticeably wrong, if you’d ever played the NTSC version.

Most publishers took the easy option. Some went further and added black borders at the top and bottom of the screen because PAL’s higher resolution (576 lines versus NTSC’s 480) meant the picture didn’t fill the screen naturally. So not only were we playing games at the wrong speed, we were playing them in a letterbox. As I wrote about in depth in The PS1’s Dirty 50Hz Secret — And How to Fix It Today, this affected some of the most beloved games of the era in ways that most players simply accepted because they had nothing to compare it to.

The PAL problem wasn’t universal — some developers did the job properly. Nintendo’s first-party PAL releases were generally well-optimised. Rare did excellent work. But third-party publishers were frequently terrible about it, and the Mega Drive era in particular was a graveyard of shoddy PAL conversions. Sonic the Hedgehog running at the wrong speed is perhaps the most famous example, but it was everywhere. This history matters when we’re talking about emulation in 2025, because the question isn’t just “can the hardware run PAL ROMs” — it’s “what does running a PAL ROM actually mean, and is it what you want?”

PAL ROMs vs NTSC ROMs: Which Should You Actually Play?

This is the question that doesn’t get asked enough in emulation discussions. When people ask about playing PAL ROMs on the RG35XX, they often mean “I have PAL ROMs because I’m British and those are the versions I find, will they work?” But the more interesting question is whether PAL ROMs are actually what you want to play.

For most games, the honest answer is no. If a PAL ROM is a straight port running at 83.3% speed with black borders, you’d have a better time playing the NTSC version through RetroArch with a 60Hz refresh rate. You’d get the game as the developer intended: correct speed, full screen, intended music tempo. The NTSC version of Sonic the Hedgehog is a materially better game than the PAL version, not because of anything creative, but because it runs as designed.

However, there are cases where PAL ROMs are genuinely the right choice. Some games were released exclusively in PAL territories. Some had content differences — additional languages, region-specific censorship changes, or, occasionally, bug fixes that made it into the PAL release but not the original NTSC version. And then there’s the nostalgia argument, which I’ll admit carries real weight. If you played the PAL version of a game as a child — if your memory of that game is at 50Hz with those specific timings — playing the NTSC version might feel subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to articulate. Your body learned a rhythm that doesn’t match.

The history of what PAL did to our childhoods is something I find genuinely fascinating, and if you want a deeper cultural read on how the UK market shaped which games even reached us at all, The Shops That Decided What You Played: GAME, Woolworths and the PAL Survival Story is worth your time. The retail gatekeeping was as significant as the technical differences.

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The Anbernic RG35XX Family: Which Version Are We Talking About?

Anbernic has released several devices under the RG35XX name, and they are not all equal. This matters enormously for the PAL lag question, because the original RG35XX is a different beast from its successors, and the distinction affects everything from performance ceiling to firmware support.

The Original RG35XX (2023)

Released in late 2022 and widely available in the UK through early 2023, the original RG35XX was a Game Boy-style vertical device — small, light, and built around an Allwinner H700 chip with 256MB of RAM. It came with Anbernic’s own stock OS, which was functional but limited. The screen was a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480.

PAL performance on the original RG35XX with stock firmware was genuinely patchy. The hardware could technically handle it, but the stock OS wasn’t doing anything clever with refresh rates, and RetroArch wasn’t pre-configured for optimal performance. For 16-bit systems — SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy Advance — it was fine for most users. PlayStation 1 PAL was more inconsistent, particularly with 3D games, where frame pacing issues could be noticeable. The device wasn’t bad; it just needed work to get the best out of it.

The RG35XX Plus (2023)

The Plus variant, released mid-2023, upgraded to a horizontal form factor more like a GBA SP or a modern handheld. Same H700 chip, same 256MB RAM, but the horizontal layout made longer play sessions more comfortable. The screen moved to a 3.5-inch IPS at the same resolution. The real improvement was community firmware: the Plus launched into a more mature Batocera and GarlicOS ecosystem, and the RetroArch configurations available for it were significantly better out of the box.

PAL ROM performance on the Plus with custom firmware is where the story gets genuinely good. Properly configured, it handles 50Hz PAL content on 16-bit systems without lag. The experience is clean. There are caveats for more demanding content, which I’ll get to, but as a PAL SNES or Mega Drive machine, the Plus is solid.

The RG35XX H (2024)

The H variant, also horizontal, brought the same core hardware but refined the build quality further, with improved shoulder buttons and a slightly better D-pad feel. It uses the same chip as its predecessors, which means the performance ceiling is identical. What changed was software maturity — by the time the H launched, the custom firmware community had worked out most of the rough edges for PAL emulation on this hardware family.

If you’re buying an RG35XX in 2025 specifically for PAL ROM playback, the H is the one to get if you want to stay in the RG35XX price bracket (typically around £40–£55 in the UK). That said, if you can stretch your budget at all, the story changes — more on that shortly.

The RG35XX SP (2024)

Anbernic also released the RG35XX SP, a GBA SP-inspired clamshell design using the same internals. The form factor is wonderful — it feels like holding a proper handheld rather than a budget emulator — but the underlying hardware is identical to the Plus and H. PAL performance is the same; you’re paying slightly more for the form factor, not the specs.

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Does the RG35XX Actually Have a PAL Lag Problem?

Here’s where I need to be honest and specific, because “lag” in this context can mean several different things, and conflating them leads to confused conversations.

Input Lag vs Frame Pacing vs Audio Sync

Input lag is the delay between pressing a button and seeing the result on screen. Frame pacing is how consistently those frames are delivered — whether the gap between frames is smooth or irregular. Audio sync is whether the game’s sound stays in time with the visuals. These are three separate problems, and PAL emulation can affect all three in different ways.

On the RG35XX, input lag is actually quite good. The hardware isn’t doing anything exotic with its display pipeline, and RetroArch’s input processing on this platform is responsive. In my testing, I couldn’t detect meaningful input lag on any 16-bit PAL ROM. Sonic 3, Super Mario World PAL, Street Fighter II Turbo PAL — all felt responsive. This is consistent with what I’d expect from the hardware; the H700 chip isn’t powerful enough to do complex upscaling or post-processing that might introduce latency.

Frame pacing is more nuanced. Here’s the core issue: the RG35XX’s screen is a 60Hz panel. If you’re running a PAL ROM at 50Hz, there’s a fundamental mismatch between the game’s output rate and the display’s refresh rate. You have a few options: run the game at 50Hz and let the display handle the mismatch (which can cause occasional stuttering), use frame blending to smooth the difference, or — and this is increasingly the community’s preferred approach — run PAL ROMs through a 60Hz-capable core with the correct timing adjustments.

Audio sync is where PAL emulation on budget hardware has historically been most problematic. When frame pacing stutters, audio often stutters with it or drifts out of sync. On the RG35XX, with stock firmware, this was occasionally noticeable on PS1 PAL games. With properly configured custom firmware and RetroArch audio settings, it’s much better — but it requires active configuration rather than just dropping ROMs into a folder.

What 50Hz on a 60Hz Screen Actually Looks Like

If you run a PAL ROM at its native 50Hz on the RG35XX’s 60Hz screen without any correction, what you get is a phenomenon called frame judder. Because 50 doesn’t divide evenly into 60, the display has to repeat frames unevenly — some frames display for one refresh cycle, others for two. The result is a subtle but perceptible unevenness in motion. Scrolling backgrounds are the most obvious tell: smooth horizontal scrolling will have occasional tiny hitches. Most people won’t consciously notice it. People who grew up playing on CRT televisions at the correct 50Hz will feel something is slightly off without being able to name it.

This is not unique to the RG35XX. It’s a fundamental challenge for any device playing 50Hz content on a 60Hz screen. The Miyoo Mini Plus has the same issue. The original Analogue Pocket, before firmware updates, had a version of this problem too, and that’s a device at eight times the price. The question is whether the RG35XX’s solution to the problem is good enough — and with the right configuration, I’d argue it is.

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How to Configure the RG35XX for Lag-Free PAL ROM Playback

This is the practical section, and I want to be thorough because vague advice like “just tweak RetroArch” isn’t actually helpful. Here’s what I actually did to get clean PAL performance on my RG35XX Plus.

Step 1: Get the Right Custom Firmware

The stock Anbernic firmware is not where you want to be for serious PAL emulation. The community has done better work. In 2025, the two main options for the RG35XX family are GarlicOS 2.0 (and its successor builds) and Batocera for RG35XX. For PAL-focused play, I lean towards Batocera because its RetroArch integration is more thoroughly configured and the per-system settings are easier to manage through the interface rather than config files.

Installing custom firmware requires formatting a microSD card correctly and following the community instructions — it’s not difficult, but it does require about twenty minutes and attention to detail. The Anbernic community on Reddit and the various Discord servers have step-by-step guides. A quality microSD card matters here: I use a SanDisk 128GB card and have never had a corruption issue, which is more than I can say for some of the unbranded cards that ship in cheap emulation handhelds.

Step 2: Configure RetroArch’s Video Refresh Rate

Within RetroArch, go to Settings → Video → Synchronisation. You want to confirm that VSync is enabled. Then navigate to Settings → Video → Output and check your refresh rate display. The device will show its screen refresh rate, which will be 60Hz.

For PAL ROMs specifically, the most effective approach on the RG35XX family is to use the Run-Ahead feature in RetroArch to handle the frame timing more cleanly. Go to Settings → Latency → Run-Ahead to Reduce Latency and set it to 1 frame. This pre-calculates one frame ahead and can smooth frame pacing on 50Hz content displayed at 60Hz. On the H700 chip, Run-Ahead at 1 frame is feasible for 16-bit content without significant performance overhead. I wouldn’t push it to 2 frames on this hardware — it’ll cause stuttering of a different kind.

Step 3: Core Selection Matters More Than You Think

For SNES PAL ROMs, use the Snes9x core rather than bsnes or its derivatives. The accuracy-focused cores are genuinely too demanding for the H700 to run without frame rate dips, and on this hardware a cycle-accurate but stuttering SNES experience is worse than a slightly less accurate but smooth one. Snes9x at its standard accuracy setting handles PAL SNES ROMs excellently and has done for years.

For Mega Drive PAL ROMs, Genesis Plus GX is the correct choice. It’s the most mature Mega Drive core in existence, it handles PAL timing correctly, and it runs beautifully on the RG35XX. This is the core used in most official retro products too — the Mega Drive Mini runs a version of Genesis Plus GX, as we noted in our PAL Mega Drive Mini Review. If it’s good enough for Sega’s own official hardware, it’s good enough for your RG35XX.

For Game Boy Advance PAL ROMs (and here it gets interesting, because GBA games were region-free but some PAL-specific versions exist), use mGBA. It’s accurate, well-maintained, and handles GBA content on the RG35XX without issues.

For PlayStation 1 PAL ROMs, use PCSX ReARMed rather than Beetle PSX. Beetle PSX is more accurate but more demanding, and on the H700 it will cause frame rate drops in 3D-heavy PAL PS1 games. PCSX ReARMed with the right BIOS file installed handles most PAL PS1 games well, though very demanding titles like Gran Turismo 2 PAL will have occasional frame drops regardless of configuration.

Step 4: The BIOS Question for PS1 PAL

PS1 emulation on any device requires the correct BIOS file, and for PAL content specifically, you want the SCPH-1002 BIOS — this is the European (PAL) PlayStation BIOS. Using the Japanese or North American BIOS for PAL PS1 games isn’t catastrophic, but using the correct regional BIOS produces more accurate behaviour, particularly for games that do region checks or use PAL-specific timing. This isn’t a legal grey area I can help you navigate, but the community is clear about which file you need — it’s your own responsibility to source it appropriately.

Step 5: Audio Configuration

In RetroArch, go to Settings → Audio. Set Audio Resampler to Sinc (rather than the lighter-weight options) and ensure Audio Latency is set to around 64ms. On the RG35XX this is a balance: too low and you’ll get audio crackling; too high and there’s perceptible audio delay. 64ms is the sweet spot I’ve landed on for PAL content. Enable Audio Sync to ensure that when the audio buffer fills, it governs frame presentation — this prevents the audio drifting ahead of or behind the visuals, which is the most common PAL emulation annoyance.

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System-by-System PAL Performance on the RG35XX

Let me go through the major systems people actually want to play PAL ROMs from, with honest assessments rather than theoretical ones.

PAL SNES on the RG35XX

Excellent. This is where the RG35XX family really earns its place. Super Mario World PAL, Donkey Kong Country PAL, Zelda: A Link to the Past PAL — all run beautifully with the Snes9x core. The PAL SNES library is substantial and has a few interesting regional quirks; the UK got some genuinely good exclusives and some games arrived in different configurations here than in North America.

The 50Hz vs 60Hz question is worth applying here on a game-by-game basis. If you’re playing Donkey Kong Country in its PAL version, know that it was one of the better-optimised PAL conversions of the era — Rare generally did solid work. Street Fighter II Turbo PAL is fine. But if you have the option to run an NTSC ROM through a 60Hz core, you might find games like Final Fantasy VI feel more responsive than the PAL version you remember, because the PAL version ran measurably slower. For nostalgia’s sake, the PAL version is valid. For pure gameplay quality, NTSC is often superior.

PAL Mega Drive on the RG35XX

Very good. Genesis Plus GX is mature enough that PAL Mega Drive runs as well on this hardware as it’s going to run anywhere short of original hardware or FPGA. The black border issue on PAL Mega Drive games — which were genuinely egregious on a real Mega Drive with a PAL TV — doesn’t apply the same way in emulation because the core handles the output resolution correctly. You get the full picture.

Sonic the Hedgehog PAL at 50Hz is still Sonic at 50Hz, though. I tested it specifically. The game is noticeably slower than its NTSC counterpart. If you’ve only ever played the PAL version, it’ll feel correct. If you’ve played the Japanese version, the difference is jarring. The RG35XX reproduces this faithfully — for better or worse. I’d personally recommend keeping both versions on your card and switching depending on your mood. The RG35XX makes this easy.

PAL Game Boy / Game Boy Colour on the RG35XX

Effectively flawless. The Game Boy hardware was not region-locked in any meaningful sense — cartridges worked in any unit — and the performance differences between PAL and NTSC Game Boy experiences were minimal because the Game Boy didn’t have the same TV output standards relationship as home consoles. The Gambatte core handles PAL Game Boy games without any perceptible issues. If you’re hunting down rare PAL Game Boy Colour cartridges, incidentally, The Unofficial UK Price Guide to Game Boy Cartridges in 2025 is a useful reference for what you’d be paying.

PAL Game Boy Advance on the RG35XX

Also excellent. GBA was effectively region-free — Nintendo didn’t region-lock the hardware — but some PAL-specific cartridge versions exist with localisation differences. The mGBA core handles these without any issues. GBA performance on the RG35XX is one of the device’s strongest suits regardless of region.

PAL PlayStation 1 on the RG35XX

Good, with caveats. For 2D PS1 games — RPGs, fighting games, platformers — PAL PS1 performance on the RG35XX with PCSX ReARMed is genuinely solid. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night PAL, Final Fantasy VII PAL, Crash Bandicoot PAL — these all run well. The early PAL PS1 library had some particularly poor conversions, with games like Tomb Raider having visible frame rate differences from their NTSC counterparts, but those issues were in the original games and the emulator reproduces them faithfully.

Where it gets harder is demanding 3D games: Gran Turismo 2 PAL, Metal Gear Solid PAL, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 PAL. These push the H700 chip harder, and frame rate drops can occur — not from the PAL emulation specifically, but from the raw performance ceiling of the hardware. This is a hardware limitation, not a configuration problem you can tune away. If PS1 is your primary use case, particularly for technically demanding PAL titles, the RG35XX is honest enough but you’d notice the improvement on more powerful hardware.

PAL Game Gear on the RG35XX

Absolutely fine. The Game Gear’s library is a pleasure to revisit and the regional library has some genuinely interesting entries — something the team at RetroInHand has explored in detail in The PAL Game Gear Library Nobody Talks About: 12 Exclusives Worth Hunting Down. The Genesis Plus GX core handles Game Gear emulation alongside Mega Drive, and PAL Game Gear ROMs run without lag or timing issues.

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The RG35XX vs the Competition for PAL ROM Playback

The RG35XX doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s one option in a crowded market of budget and mid-range retro handhelds, and for British gamers specifically, the PAL performance question is worth comparing across the main alternatives.

RG35XX vs Miyoo Mini Plus

The Miyoo Mini Plus is the RG35XX’s most direct competitor at a similar price point (typically £45–£60 in the UK). For PAL ROM playback, they’re genuinely comparable — both run RetroArch on similar hardware, both have 60Hz screens dealing with the same 50Hz PAL content challenge, and both benefit significantly from custom firmware. The Miyoo Mini Plus arguably has a more mature firmware ecosystem (OnionOS is excellent), but the PAL performance ceiling is essentially the same as the RG35XX’s. If PAL emulation is your deciding factor, it shouldn’t be — they’re equivalent. Choose between them on form factor and build quality. Our detailed head-to-head in RG40XX H vs Miyoo Mini Plus: Which Should You Buy in 2025? gets into the specifics. Our standalone Miyoo Mini Plus Review is also worth reading if you’re deciding between the two.

RG35XX vs RG40XX H

The RG40XX H is the more interesting comparison because it sits a step above in both price (around £65–£80 in the UK) and performance. It uses a more powerful chip and has a larger 4-inch screen, and for PS1 PAL emulation specifically the extra performance headroom makes a noticeable difference on demanding 3D titles. If you’re primarily concerned about PS1 PAL performance, the RG40XX H is the device I’d point you towards. The 16-bit PAL experience is excellent on both, so if your library is primarily SNES and Mega Drive PAL, the RG35XX is sufficient and saves you money.

RG35XX vs FPGA Options

This is where the conversation changes fundamentally. FPGA-based handhelds — the Analogue Pocket being the most prominent example in the UK — don’t emulate hardware; they recreate it at the circuit level. For PAL content, this means the timing is inherently correct because the FPGA is actually running a hardware replica of the original chipset, not a software interpretation of it. There are no 50Hz/60Hz mismatch decisions to make in software configuration because the FPGA handles timing the same way the original hardware did.

The Analogue Pocket retails at around £219, which is four to five times the price of an RG35XX. For most people, the RG35XX properly configured gets you 90–95% of the PAL fidelity at 20% of the price. That last 5–10% matters enormously to some people and not at all to others. If you’re the sort of person who noticed the difference between a PAL and NTSC CRT picture as a child, you might care. The Best FPGA Handheld for SNES Games Under £150 UK guide covers the middle ground if the Analogue Pocket’s price is a barrier.

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The Cultural Context: Why PAL Still Carries Emotional Weight

I want to take a moment to say something that might sound dramatic but I mean entirely seriously: the PAL problem wasn’t just a technical inconvenience. It was a formative experience that shaped how an entire generation of British and European gamers related to games, and the fact that we’re still asking questions about PAL performance in 2025 is a small but telling sign that the wound hasn’t quite closed.

I grew up in Manchester in the nineties, and my first console was a Mega Drive. I played Sonic the Hedgehog — the PAL version, obviously — and I loved it. I had no idea it was running slower than intended. I had no idea the scrolling background in Green Hill Zone was slightly less smooth than it was supposed to be, or that the music was playing at a fractionally lower pitch. I learned these things later, in my teens, when the internet started making NTSC comparisons visible, and the feeling was genuinely strange. Something I’d loved and internalised was revealed to be a compromised version of itself. That’s a specific kind of nostalgia disruption that I think a lot of British gamers of a certain age will recognise.

The PAL experience wasn’t all negative, to be fair. Some games actually benefited — a handful of PAL conversions introduced fixes that weren’t in the original NTSC releases, and the additional development time occasionally meant better localisation. The PAL gaming landscape also produced its own culture: the specific games that came out here, the specific magazines that reviewed them, the specific shops that stocked them. All of that is real and worth honouring. The feeling of picking up a UK Mega Drive game at Woolworths in 1993, in its UK box with the European PEGI-predecessor rating, is a distinct cultural object from picking up the same game in a US games store. That specificity of place and time is something emulation can’t fully reproduce — but it can get close.

What I find genuinely moving about the emulation handheld scene in 2025 is that it takes these questions seriously. The fact that you can configure a £45 device to correctly handle PAL timing — that communities have spent years optimising firmware to make these regional differences feel right — is a form of cultural preservation that I think deserves more recognition than it gets. The SNK vs Capcom PAL library question — which fighting games held up on PAL hardware, which didn’t — is exactly the kind of nuanced regional discussion that SNK vs. Capcom on PAL Hardware: Which Fighting Library Still Holds Up? unpacks with real care.

The retro handheld community is, in a real sense, doing archival work. When someone carefully configures a PAL Mega Drive ROM to run at the correct 50Hz with authentic audio timing on a device that fits in a jacket pocket, they’re making a specific historical choice — to experience this game as it was experienced in this region, in this era. That’s not nostalgia tourism. That’s history.

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Common PAL ROM Problems on the RG35XX and How to Fix Them

Let me address the specific issues people actually run into, based on my own experience and what I’ve seen discussed in the community.

Game Runs Slowly in PAL

This might not be a problem. If you’re playing a PAL ROM that was a bad 50Hz conversion, it will run at 83.3% speed — and on the RG35XX, it will run at exactly that speed because the emulator is accurately reproducing the original hardware behaviour. If you want the game at correct speed, you have two options: find the NTSC version, or use RetroArch’s Game Speed option (under Quick Menu → Options for some cores) to apply a speed correction. Note that this isn’t available for all cores, and applying artificial speed correction will make the music sound slightly wrong because the audio will be pitch-shifted. Neither option is perfect; it’s a choice between imperfect approaches.

Black Borders on PAL Games

This is the PAL overscan issue. In RetroArch, go to Quick Menu → Core Options for whichever core you’re using. For Genesis Plus GX (Mega Drive), there’s a Border Colour option and display-related settings that let you crop the borders. For SNES (Snes9x), look for overscan settings that crop the black bars. This won’t fix all cases — some games genuinely used the extra PAL resolution for content — but for most games with black bars, you can crop them cleanly.

Audio Crackling on PAL PS1 Games

This is typically an audio buffer issue. Go to Settings → Audio → Output in RetroArch and increase your Audio Latency from 64ms to 96ms. Yes, this technically adds a tiny amount of audio latency, but on a device you’re holding in your hands with headphones or speakers directly attached, the difference between 64ms and 96ms is imperceptible in practice. The crackling is caused by the buffer emptying between frames, and a slightly larger buffer prevents it.

Screen Tearing on PAL Games

Screen tearing on the RG35XX is occasionally reported with PAL content at 50Hz. The solution is almost always ensuring VSync is enabled in RetroArch (Settings → Video → Synchronisation → Vertical Sync). If tearing persists, check whether your custom firmware has a display driver setting — some firmware builds have display sync options at the system level that need to match the RetroArch settings.

Game Doesn’t Launch at All

Some PAL ROMs have unusual file formats or header information that certain cores don’t handle. For SNES PAL ROMs, some older dumps include a copier header that causes issues. The Snes9x core usually handles this transparently, but if a specific ROM won’t launch, try a different dump. For PS1 PAL ROMs, ensure the file is in BIN/CUE format rather than ISO — the CUE file contains track information that some PAL PS1 games need for audio.

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Should You Use PAL or NTSC ROMs on the RG35XX? My Actual Recommendation

This is the question at the heart of everything, and I want to give you a genuinely useful answer rather than a wishy-washy “it depends.”

My recommendation: use NTSC ROMs as your default for any game that had a substandard PAL conversion, and use PAL ROMs specifically when you have a reason to. The reasons to use PAL ROMs include: the game was PAL-exclusive, the game was particularly well-optimised for PAL (Rare’s output is a good guide here), you’re doing deliberate historical recreation, or the specific PAL version has content differences you care about.

The RG35XX handles NTSC ROMs at 60Hz beautifully — its screen is 60Hz, the performance is better, and for most games the experience is simply superior. Running Mega Drive games at 60Hz on the RG35XX via NTSC ROMs is a revelation if you grew up on PAL hardware. Sonic the Hedgehog at the intended speed is genuinely better. Streets of Rage 2 at 60Hz is noticeably more impressive than the PAL version. For the RG35XX specifically, where the performance ceiling can sometimes be tight for demanding PAL PS1 content, using NTSC ROMs where available also means slightly less demanding emulation work, which benefits frame pacing.

That said, I keep a PAL folder on my card alongside NTSC versions for games where I want the regional experience — not because the PAL version is technically better, but because it’s historically specific. My copy of James Pond 2: Robocod is PAL. My copy of Sensible Soccer is PAL. These are British games in a cultural sense, and running them in PAL feels appropriate in a way I’m not sure I can fully defend technically but am confident about emotionally.

There’s a parallel here with the vinyl vs digital debate in music, or the discussion around film grain in cinema. Sometimes the technically imperfect version is the version that carries meaning. The RG35XX is good enough to let you make this choice intentionally rather than having it made for you — and that’s more than the actual PAL hardware ever offered us.

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The Bottom Line: Is the RG35XX Worth Buying for PAL ROM Playback in 2025?

Yes, absolutely, with one clear caveat about PS1.

For PAL SNES, PAL Mega Drive, PAL Game Boy, PAL Game Boy Advance, PAL Game Gear, and PAL Master System, the RG35XX (in any of its Plus, H, or SP variants) is an excellent machine. Properly configured with custom firmware and the right RetroArch core settings — all of which I’ve detailed above — it handles PAL ROM playback cleanly, with no meaningful input lag, good audio sync, and solid frame pacing. The 50Hz/60Hz screen mismatch is a real phenomenon but it’s manageable at this level, and the average player won’t find it intrusive.

For demanding PAL PS1 games specifically, the RG35XX shows its performance limits. It’s fine for most titles, and excellent for 2D PS1 content, but technically demanding 3D PAL PS1 games push the H700 chip hard enough that frame rate dips can occur. If PS1 is your main use case and your library leans towards 3D racing games, driving games, or the more technically ambitious action titles, consider stepping up to the RG40XX H or a comparable device with more processing headroom.

At £40–£55 for the RG35XX H in 2025, you’re getting a genuinely capable PAL emulation machine for less than the price of two original PAL Mega Drive games in decent condition. The community firmware is mature, the configuration work required is a one-time investment, and the end result is a pocket-sized device that handles the British gaming library with more care and accuracy than most of us ever had access to on original hardware.

The PAL problem defined a generation of British gaming. We played slower games in letterbox windows and called it normal, because we didn’t know any better. The RG35XX, configured properly, lets you finally choose: play those games exactly as they were, with all the historical authenticity that implies, or play them as they were supposed to be. That’s not a small thing. It’s a kind of justice, thirty-five years in the making, available for under fifty quid.

I’ll take it.