Another Sunday, Another Import Sunday! Today we’re going to talk about the region lock-out tabs in the SNES. In America, there would be tabs where the circles are (pictured above). These tabs are meant to prevent Japanese games from being played on American systems (PAL carts cannot be played on NTSC due to differences in frequencies. Japan and America are similar regions, NTSC and NTSC-J respectively.) When you remove these tabs, you can play Japanese games on your American SNES!
Looking at the second picture you can see the pinboards are the exact same size but the American cart (above) has grooves in it while the Japanese Super Famicom cart does not which is the topic of this post. These tabs can easily be removed with needle-nose pliers from a SNES console and then you can play Japanese games with equal ease! The SNES is probably one of the easiest consoles to mod for region locking for this reason! Hope this information helps in your gaming and look for next week’s Import Sunday!
This article was initially written on my blog the Video Game Conservation that I made for an assignment while attending the University of Texas at Dallas. You can find the original article and others here.