Topic: Bought NES (AUS/PAL) on eBay and its running very slow (SUPER MARIO BROS)

Hi,

I bought an original PAL A NES (nes-001), I have it hooked up to a 50-60hz PAL CRT. For some reason Super Mario Bros is running super slow, and when I say slow I DO NOT MEAN pal vs ntsc slow, I mean very slow, maybe half speed. The cartridge says GBR in bottom right corner of label and it is not a duck hunter combo.
I also tried plugging it into a modern tv via a/v and it still didn't work. So I am guessing it is the console, or maybe the console and cart combined. Does anyone know why this could be happening? Is this normal? Is GBR PAL A or B, and would they both play the same in a PAL A console like mine. Can someone please help me troubleshoot this.

Regards, Daniel.

As I understand, for NES games, the UK, Italy and Australia/NZ were the PAL-A countries.
I wonder if it is TV lag, if it is not normal PAL vs. NTSC speed issues.

(though from what I've seen of ROM archival sites, some PAL countries, which I think includes the UK, got SMB with the NTSC version ROM inside, while other countries got a revised PAL ROM. That is, one that seems to have been simply sped up to counter the PAL slowdown, but possibly overcorrected and runs faster than the NTSC version, at least according to emulator testing.)

I'm not certain, but I think of all licensed SMB carts in the world, those with ROM version 0 (marked on the chip inside the cart) are the NTSC ROM, and version 1 is that PAL-updated ROM, I think.
I don't think there were multiple NTSC revisions, as there was with later NES SMB games, were there?)
Was there a correlation with PAL country variations between those which got the American (giant pixel Mario) cover art and those which got the Japanese (illustrated) artwork? I hear that was also a difference in PAL-region packaging.