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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
then we water-cool our coffeemakers...
I remember getting Megaman for a christmas present many years ago and it had slowdown at some points when there were alot of enemies on screen. Here aa review on the game that mentions the slowdown in it: http://www.nesplayer.com/reviews/mm2r.htm
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
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.
...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. ;)
*(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.