… i just recently moved to canada from the UK, and brought my nintendo Wii with me, because ive spent a tonne of money on the thing and wasnt gonna rebuy it all.
i had downloaded a load of the old retro games, which considering they are basically all the EU versions they only run in 50Hz, which UK TVs have run in for ages.
These games will not display correctly on the new TV i bought over in canada, i assume that 50Hz TVs were never actually available over here and the standard was always 60Hz. i get sound but no picture at all, just a black screen.
does anybody know of a way i can get these games to display on the TV without having to buy a new console and redownload all the games again? (which is not an option basically)
ive seen some supposed converters online that will convert 50hz signal to 60hz, but they seem crazy expensive, and im not totally sure if that would be the best route to take. im not really that tech savvy with stuff like this.
if anyone has any experience with this sort of thing any advice you can give would be very much appreciated.
im already using component cables. i dont want to start hacking my console. the problem isnt the wii itself, all of the games that have 60Hz options run fine, just the ones that only run in 50hz are the problems. so a load of the older VC games such as snes and megadrive, some gamecube games. everything else is fine.
Nintendo is terrible with PAL vc. Just softmod your wii and play your games on the corresponding emulator. Sorry =/
edit: Softmodding is pretty painless these days, its doubtful that Nintendo is even going to try to stop it anymore. Just make sure you’re update to 4.3 and follow a guide like the neogaf one (http://http://gwht.wikidot.com/) or use modmii (gbatemp guide down at the moment, sorry)
Unless you’re willing to hack your Wii to use NTSC, you’re basically screwed. Since North America is NTSC there’s no reason for a television to support PAL. I believe there are a few HDTVs out there that do support PAL but it sounds like it’s too late for you to buy one.
And the signal converters that support the Wii being expensive sounds about right, at my job we have some affordable multiformat converters that do Composite and S-Video and they’re complete shit, every one of them.
If you wanna play your Wii as cheaply as possible, head out to thrift stores and find an old CRT TV with a V Hold knob and hope that it can be tweaked down enough to go down to 50hz, of course unless it does RGB or Component you’re stuck playing it in black and white, and the difference in height between NTSC and PAL might cut off part of the screen (it does that on my TV but if you find one with a V Center/Position knob you could adjust that).
Sorry if this isn’t what you want to hear.
Another option could be to get a video capture card for your computer since they will take a NTSC or PAL input (often SECAM and lesser-used PAL formats too, for what its worth), you could even have your computer output to your HDTV and play your Wii on there. Unfortunately capture cards introduce lag and sometimes it’s really bad (if they have a hardware encoder, it’ll lag badly).