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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
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. ;)
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...
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.
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.