Looks like its gonna have to be Satoshi Matrix to the rescue
I've been asked these sorts of questions many times so I'll erite up an FAQ for you. This will detail all reliant info so you might already know some of this.
Q: Is the Japanese Famicom region free? A: Technically, yes. The Famicom (HVC-001) and its many variants including the SHARP Twin and AV Famicom are region free and will play
almost every game made worldwide through the use of a pin adapter.
Q: Is the North American or European NES "toaster" region free? The North American and European Nintendo Entertainment System models NES-001 featured a lockout chip called the NES-10 on the motherboard. The lockout chip was installed to thwart small developers from simply making their own terrible games and flooding the market as had happened with the Atari 2600. A side effect of the lockout chip was region locking. An NES-001 "toaster" can only play games from its own region.
However, you can (and should) disable the pesky little chip by simply cutting pin 4 to rob it of power. This poses no ill effects on the system and allows you to play games from other regions on your NES-001. There are many tutorials on exactly how to do this online, just google "disable NES lockout".
Q: Is the North American NES-101 "NES 2 Toploader" region free? A: Like the Famicom, technically yes, the NES-101 is region free. Like the Famicoms, the NES-101 does not feature the NES-10 lockout chip. As of 1993, Nintendo of America no longer felt the need to police NES game production, especially since the major unlicensed game developers (tengen, color dreams, camerica) had figured out ways of getting around the NES-10 anyway. The NES-101 will play
almost every game made worldwide and almost every Famciom game through the use of a pin adapter.
Q: You said almost every game will play. What do you mean? Which ones won't? A: Even though the question is about software, this is really a hardware question. PAL NES games are different than US/Japan ones because the hardware was slightly different. Under the hood of the NES, you have the same general chips as the Famicom, meaning the only difference is the pin connectors, shape of the motherboard and shape of the casing. The European NES however was different.
The European NES had a slightly slower 1.66Mhz processor to the US/Japan's 1.79Mhz, meaning the Europeans got a system 17% slower than the rest of the world. PAL TV standards were such that the number of pixels on screen was different in PAL land. This meant that automatically North American games could not simply be put on a PAL NES, even without getting into the lockout chip problem. If you try and run the vast majority of North American or Japanese game on a PAL system, the game will not display correctly and will run 17%
slower than it should. The reverse is also true - most PAL NES games on an North American system won't display correctly and will run 17%
faster than they should.
Therefore, PAL games had to be designed for the hardware they had in mind, with an adjusted clock speed and new aspect ratio. To further complicate matters, games in Europe came in two formats, depending on the country - PAL A and PAL B. PAL A and B aren't compatible with each other, let alone North American NTSC.
So the bottom line is that there are some European NES games that simply won't play on anything but a PAL NES and a PAL TV.
Hope this helps!
