Are SNES PAL games before 1993 region locked

region-locksnes

Are SNES games before 1993 region locked? I have lots of SNES games from 1993 and 1992 which I really wanna play on something like a SupaBoy, which is an NTSC system.

Best Answer

All official SNES games are region locked, regardless of their release date.

However, passthrough cartridges - where you plug in two cartridges to use the region locking chip from another game - do exist, although I can't remember any specific products.

You can also modify your SNES to disable the lockout chip, and in that case, many, but not all games work - some have additional protection against this scenario.

The games released later in the SNES life cycle are more likely to have this extra protection. Tthere is no hard rule which states "all games released after X have that protection", but Super Mario RPG is known to be one of the most troublesome games out there.

A few years ago, someone made a custom region lock chip, SuperCIC, which should work with everything, including Super Mario RPG. However, it is a little more complicated to install, so unless you have a game which is known to cause problems with the classic mod, you might prefer the easier way out.