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Nintendo NES Overclocking Guide
Deven "Epicenter" Gallo writes "I've perfected a process by which to overclock the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to run games smoother without slowdown. The NES CPU normally runs at 1.79 MHz, I've reached a stable maximum of 4.2 MHz, about a 230% overclock. The games do not run faster than they should, the CPU never overheats, and most games are perfect up to 3.3 MHz!" Here's the guide on how to perform the modification, along with photos and demonstration videos
I'm curious, the article summary ( or the webpage, I can't remember ) mentions that now all of your games will run smoothly. I don't remember any games not being very smooth, but then, I was a small child at the time.
What are some games that could stand to be played on an overclocked NES?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
They say not to do it in the manuals because they were selling their own cleaning solution at the time and wanted you to spend money on their product.
I used to do it all the time. Perfectly safe.
For Science! ... I started to see minor glitching around 3.6, 4.0 was pretty wacky, 4.2, crazy. But it was fun. I certainly wasn't going to stop raising the clock because it wasn't practical. ;)
If some more systems are donated, absolutely. :) My next candidates are the Sega Master System, Saturn, maybe the Game Gear too. Also the Sega Nomad / Mega Jet if I can get my hands on one. *hint hint*.
Always worked.
I seriously think most of the corrosion these carts suffered from was caused by excessive humidity due to all the spitting and hot breath. The kids who spit on them all the time were doing it out of habit, not because of a real reason.
John
The audio hardware in the NES is partially included into the CPU. Raising its clock then, raises the audio hardware's clock and shifts up the pitch. Were I going to try and make a hoax I'd at least lock down the pitch when speeding up video, wouldn't I? ;)
Make no mistake, it's overclocked.
It's very bad form to buy a chip and overclock it, then sell it like that. There's also no guarantee each chip will be STABLE outside of spec. It's a luck thing. Any rate, The manufacturer would be pissed. So, Nintendo'd have to buy the higher rated chip. Which cost more money. And as we all know, Nintendo has a very tight collective wallet... and back then, those 1 or 2 MHz on a CPU rating could come at a real premium.
Go and download the Mario Brothers 3 vid from the site and watch the count down clock. Not only does he double the clock speed on the motherboard, he also cuts the time in half that one is able to beat a level!
Either that's the explination, or some wierd time warp has opened up and defied the laws of relativity via NES. Perhaps that's why I got the orignal Zelda for christmas.
So wait.. why does this matter anyways? Just get an emulator. Still..Hella sweet mod. Right up there with softmodding an xbox.
HoHoHo - Simrook
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
I have a little experience with the NES and emulation ;)
The music gets out of whack and the time in the game doesn't work correctly...you can see it happen in the video of SMB3.
I'd also like to have one of those laser thermal sensors take the temperature of the chip on the normal clock speed and the overclocked speed.
Geek factor = 10; usage factor = 2. If you can find your NES, let alone have it work, all the power to you. If you give up, you can always hit zophar.net and emulate them.
How do you know all this if I may ask?
Blowing DID help get problem carts to load, but only if you blew warm air. The moisture from your breath was often enough to give those carts and bad connectors the extra connection they needed to load. The problem with this method is that the same moisture that helped the cart load further corroded the contacts over time.
Remember having to remove-and-blow 5 or 10 times before it would work? Could THAT much dust have accumulated?
When you blow warm air from your lungs and get enough moisture in there, you never have to blow more than once. My friends always wondered why they could blow a dozen times in a cart and it still not work, and I was able to do it the first time - everytime.
Not that I suggest anyone do this on a regular basis. The alcohol/q-tip method is the correct one, as the parent pointed out. Someone else asked if this is really safe when the carts and manuals specificaly say not to use alcohol to clean carts. Well, I learned this method by calling Nintendo customer support in the 80s. They said to mix a half part water with a half part alcohol, but that got to be too big a hassle for me. I've cleaned hundreds of carts (and other electronics) with straight rubbing alcohol for years. Works like a charm.
With the Master System, Game Gear and Nomad, would it not be easier, as they use stock CPUs, to simply upgrade the CPUs? I think the Nomad is a Genesis derivative, right? and I think 68000 and Z80 CPUs twice as fast as the Genesis' 68000 and Z80 exist...
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
(this makes me wonder why 3d PC games
often suffer the slideshow effect, intead
of gracefully going into slow motion.
From what I've seen that comes from running out of texture memory and trying to stream the textures from the main memory through the AGP. Because the AGP is too slow to do that while pushing through the scene data and maintaining a good framerate you see a sudden jump as the data per frame increases tenfold. Some games do gradually go into slowmo but that's usually because the CPU can't catch up (as the drawing limits of the GPU are rarely exceeded or even met).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Come to think about it, you probably didn't mean the jump from 60 FPS to 2 FPS but the game running on at the same speed. That's because of time dependant physics as opposed to frame dependant which allows the games to run on varying framerates without a difference in speed. A NES game running at 200FPS would be unplayable, a modern game at 200FPS is merely more fluid. This kind of behaviour is necessary with 3d games as framerates tend to be less stable with 3d grapics (and varying amounts of free ressources).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yes, I think they got them up to 12mhz or so. The problem was not really an issue of the proc so much as an issue of the ISA bus timing.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
NES folks have difficulty replacing processor because the sound unit is integrated to CPU...
...otherwise, we would have already seen some mods that would stick in a 65816 (as with Commodore 64) and take the homebrew games to the next level. =)
Yet, it's cool to see someone actually overclocking the thing and seeing what that does to the games! At least that will deal with the slowdown a bit. And, of course, it's at last a chance to see how well Nintendo games were actually coded - the games should work if you make the hardware different, even when the consoles traditionally never have to take hardware differences in account... or even if hardware differences were an issue at all in those days.