Overclocking the Super Nintendo

Robert Ivy writes "The Super Nintendo is a tricky piece of hardware, but I have finally managed to overclock it up to 5.1 MHz. At this speed, the sprites scatter across the screen; this is likely a sync issue since the CPU is running so far out of spec. I plan on trying lower speeds soon and I will update the guide on UCM." Thank god we got that out of the way!

Comments

Re:An A for the effort

[Megane]

The usefulness comes in with games which use the vertical sync as a timebase. If they take too many computations per frame, they will miss the vertical sync, and only sync to every other vertical frame. This causes a slowdown to half speed. Overclocking the CPU allows it to do more work per frame, avoiding slowdowns. There are released games which exhibit this problem, and not all of them are action games. In Harvest Moon, if you have more than ten cows in the barn, slowdowns will happen.

This is known to be useful on the Dreamcast, where it improves emulator performance.

Re:An A for the effort

[despisethesun]

Actually, you can overclock the NES and the Genesis both without really suffering any ill effects, but their hardware was quite a bit more simple than the SNES. You can find the Genesis guide here, and the NES one here.

Re:Emulation

[Mitchell Mebane]

Nestopia (as well as BSNES and ZSNES and, I believe, other emulators) use Blargg's NTSC filter to produce the TV-like output. Truly an amazing piece of work.

As far as accuracy goes, the C64 emulator Hoxs64 is pretty damn accurate, going so far as to emulate analog stuff in the disk drive. Wow.