I moved from the UK to the US in 2007, bringing with me a large collection of GameCube games that I currently can't play on my Wii. Whatever GameCube boot program I try, the games simply refuse to load at all. Thankfully I picked up a US GameCube on the cheap and I can use the Freeloader disc, but that's one more device hooked up to my TV than is strictly speaking necessary.
Out of sheer boredom one afternoon I tried using every game I own with GeckOS on the Wii in the hopes that maybe
one game might work. I found a game that works -
Serious Sam: Next Encounter.
I can't understand why this game in particular would work when all of my other games don't. You'll have to bear with me as I'm not really up-to-speed with how the GameCube or Wii does these things, but the only thing I can think of is that every PAL GameCube game may be sending a command that says, "Hello, I'm a PAL GameCube game, so you're probably going to want to output at PAL50 for now." American models of the Wii, for whatever reason (probably for this very reason, thinking about it), isn't set up to either parse that command or output PAL50/PAL60 signals, and so doesn't. The game freezes.
Serious Sam: Next Encounter, however, doesn't send that command. The game runs in the native screen resolution of the console it's being playing on.
This is fascinating to me. I doubt I'm right - probably people who know what they're doing have explored similar avenues and turned up a No Go - but if I
am right the trick is to catch that command, the one every other PAL GameCube is sending but that
Serious Sam isn't, and nullify it.
Has there been any exploration of this cross-region difficulty? Has anyone so far come to any specific conclusions? Will I
ever be able to play my PAL EUR copies of
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures and
Mario Kart: DoubleDash!! on my US Wii?