Adrian’s Description:

When OutRunners got ported to the Japanese Mega Drive in 1994, it was very poorly received to the point where Sega had no interest in bringing the game to the west. In this 16-bit port of the massive arcade hit, Sega chose to squish the full screen 1 Player image into a half screen image much like in Sonic 2’s 2 Player VS mode and the bottom half showed you racing against a rival to the finish line in every race. It only got a North American NTSC Genesis release because Data East saw the game as a missed opportunity and decided to publish it in North America, when it came to PAL regions they got nothing at all.

Well this patch here is designed to work ONLY ON PAL AND FRENCH SECAM SEGA MEGA DRIVE consoles running at 50Hz. I reversed the region lockout of the original Japanese release so it’s now blocked from running in Japan Mega Drive NTSC 60Hz and North America NTSC 60Hz. It’s a patch that’s specifically designed to give the PAL regions a version of the game that they should have gotten back in the day but didn’t.

NOTES: 

1. I used the Japanese ROM to reverse the region lockout instead of the USA Genesis ROM because the Japanese ROM has better compatibility with PAL systems over the USA Genesis ROM. The USA Genesis ROM has weird checker dots corrupting the graphics when played in PAL 50Hz yet the Japanese ROM doesn’t and looks and plays just fine.

2. The game has no Japanese text and everything is in English.

3. The game has slower music being played in PAL 50Hz but surprisingly it sounds very groovy and fits the game better.

4. The patch is in Lunar IPS, all you need to do is patch it to the Japanese ROM of the game (the one with the Sonic & Tails Sega logo).

5. If you’re a fan of the OutRun driving games on the Mega Drive then maybe give this one a try if you haven’t? The half screen does make the game hard to enjoy but the controls, graphics, music and overall gameplay are okay.