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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 overclocked the NES to about 300MHz once. It was easy. First, I took the NES case itself and opened it up, revealing the delicate insides. Using a small screwdriver, I removed the mainboard and switches and power supply from the plastic case. Then I threw that shit away. I put in a small motherboard with a 266MHz Intel, hooked up a keyboard and mouse and monitor, and small HD. Downloaded an emulator. Used some fancy soldering to hook the NES controller up to the parallel port. Boom, there you go.
Think carefully before overclocking your NES. This procedure will most likely void the warranty.
That's pretty impressive - more than double clock speed increase.
I wonder how far it could be pushed with heatsinks & active cooling. Time to being those finnish guys and their liquid nitrogen in, see if we can push it past 6MHz
Ahh, back when all you had to worry about was dust. We've come so far. Now all we have to worry about are tiny scratches ruining your investment.
This space for rent...
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?
then we water-cool our coffeemakers...
you no longer have to blow on the cartridges to get them to work
Gah, this old myth.
Again, blowing on the cartridges generally does nothing. You're not getting a bad connection due to an infinitessimally thin layer of dust, unless you've been letting these carts sit around for a decade or more.
The reason NES carts don't work nicely is the poor connector in the console itself, and the fact that using 2 different types of metals in a connection leads to massive corrosion. The way to fix this is to scrub the hell out of the cart connections using a Q-tip soaked in rubbing alcohol.
Why did blowing seem to work back in the day? The corrosion isn't uniform, and odds are the removal and re-insertion of the cartridge not only removed a tiny bit of the corrosion, but also moved it over a tiny amount, thereby establishing a strong connection. Remember having to remove-and-blow 5 or 10 times before it would work? Could THAT much dust have accumulated?
Trust me, I've spent the past 5 years re-conditioning old NES decks and cartridges. Haven't blown on a single one, but short of a dead deck the rubbing alcohol trick has led to every single cart I own working (several hundred and counting).
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"The games do not run faster than they should"
So what's the point in overclocking it? Faster load times?
...there would be some very significant side effects to such modifications:
1. NES audio is generated within the 'RP2A03G' (CPU) chip and is based on clock cycles, so doubling the CPU clock will cause the audio to go up an octave (assuming it even runs). The site mentioned in the article actually pointed this out, so it looks like it's legitimate.
2. Games which use cycle-timed code will no longer work properly - Battletoads is the first that comes to mind.
3. Some NES cartridges only used 250ns PRG ROM chips, which is only good up to 2MHz; go any higher and the game may not run at all.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
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*.
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.
SNES9X is ... a SNES emulator. This article is about the NES ... at any rate, a lot of us prefer real hardware to inaccurate emulators.
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.
Slashdot has gotten really slopppy. Wasn't this story supposed to be posted 15 years ago?
Technically:
All copper lines on a PCB are traces. This includes power and ground lines, excepting large areas of copper, which are usually called planes. Also, there are things called "ground shields", which are actually not connected to ground - they're electrically isolated continuous bits of copper used to provide electromagnetic shielding.
Anyway.
Traces are the copper lines on a PCB - buses are composed of multiple traces carrying a collection of related signals (for example, an address bus is N traces, each carrying one bit of the N bit address.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
I'm surprised there wasn't a Zelda demo on the site. Whenever there was a room of those Jumping guys that turned into bats when you stab them, the system would lag like hell if you made too many bats. Also if I remember correctly, those pancake guys (?) that ate your shields never did much for the framerate either. ...Finally, a better solution to killing those guys than the Magic Sword
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
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.
Rusty,
I'm not trying to contradict you or be a smartass.
Ah, the good old days. How glad I am that I will never, ever have to live through them again.
Today is the good old days for tomorrow. Kinda sucks to think of all our current cool shit in that context, but back when it was the good old days, we thought our cool shit was as cool as we now think of our cool shit.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
When we were kids and didn't know better, we thought the slowdown was a special effect in the game.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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,"
Yes. There used to be PC clones that had a "turbo" switch on - that changed the CPU clock from whatever they were normally clocked at to 4.77MHz so that software that required precise timing loops would work correctly (step forward Sopwith...) on newer machines.
If you find that your CPU doesn't work at above 6MHz, try swapping it for an NEC V20 or V30 (can't remember offhand which) - this was faster even for a given clock speed, went to around 10MHz, and 8086 compatible into the bargain.
I used to have (probably still do somewhere) a Compaq 286 with a 6MHz 287 fitted instead of the 8MHz part. Worked just fine.
*(this makes me wonder why 3d PC games
often suffer the slideshow effect, intead
of gracefully going into slow motion.*
because of timing. in pc games most of the time(all the time now if it's what is considered properly done) the game logic(the game itself) will run same speed on every computer(that is, the enemies and everything else move regardless of if there's time to draw them on the screen).
it's not just with modern games, it was a 'problem' or a feature on some older games as well. stunts(or 4d sports driving) could be played on a 8mhz pc.. but damn if the track was complex or if there were an ai driven car on the track... you would basically have to drive 'blind' as after the start it could take quite some time before the screen updated the next time(but, everything moved anyhow).
basically it's about how you choose to do things. and if you're intending to add network play at any stage you basically have to keep the engine running regardless of if you have time to draw things or not at speedy rate enough.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
it isn't an overclock if it's sold at such, then it's STOCK SPEED for the computer(regardless of where the chip originates from).
though, now they have coined up using 'overclock' as a marketing term..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Forgive me for linking to the file directly, but here's a direct link to a demonstration video showing the overclocking differences in Super Mario Bros. 3.
;-)
Instead of observing the obvious improvements in fluid animation (and gameplay), listen to the audio differences in both before and after overclocking. The original is exactly how I remember SMB3 to sound, while the overclocked version sounds kind of whacked.
To me, the audio from these classic games is JUST AS important as the video, so I won't be overclocking until a better method is found that won't screw up audio.... but I'd imagine the bulk of people who still have *working* NES units, wouldn't want to mess around with their precious vintage systems anyways
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
Has anyone duplicated this after reading? Just wondering. Instead of praising / dissing the article, it would be nice if someone actually used the information. Maybe provide some new information for those that are interested, like testing new games (Zelda?).
Granted this is not a very useful mod today, but who cares? If it doesn't do it for you, move along, nothing here to see. For those of us that do dig it, it's a great lil' holiday read.
Must-not-watch TV!
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.