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GamesPAL Exclusives: The Regional Retro Games Worth HuntingPAL was its own market, with its own scarcity and prices — and a handful of games that never left the region. Here's how to hunt regional retro games without overpaying.
nintendoWhy SNES Shell Yellowing Is the Honest Collector's TestFlip over the next SNES you find at a flea market. Odds are the top shell and the bottom shell are two different colours — one drifting toward old margarine, the other still close to Nintendo's original grey. That mismatch isn't grime, and it isn't just sun damage. It's chemistry, and it's the most useful thing to understand before you buy, sell, or restore Super Nintendo hardware. Why one console yellows in two different shades The SNES shell is ABS plastic mixed with brominated flame retard
GlossaryWhat PAL, NTSC-U and NTSC-J Actually Mean for CollectorsPut a PAL copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 next to an American one and press start. The European version runs noticeably slower — music and all — because it was built for a different television standard, not for your convenience. That's region coding in one sentence: the same game on the same silicon, behaving differently depending on which continent's TV signal it was designed to feed. If you buy retro games across borders, these three-letter codes decide what you can play, how it runs, and what y