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

An A for the effort

[Opportunist]

Don't get me wrong, great job OCing your console, but ... what purpose does it serve? If it's done to prove that it's possible, then more power to you.

But if the plan was to get "more" out of your console, I guess it wasn't too bright. Console proggers always relied on the fact that consoles, unlike PCs, were set in stone. You had THAT CPU, THAT GPU, THAT memory and that's something you can rely on. I.e., they didn't do what PC game creators have to do today: Take into account different hardware specs and take care of timing.

More often than not, they used the CPU clock as the timing device (everyone who ever played Wing Commander on a 486 knows the effect you get when you do that on a platform that can very well change the hardware). So if you tweak the CPU, you get a game that runs "too fast".

But little else.

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.

Emulation

[mmkkbb]

Do they randomly overclock chips on the board? I know there are cycle-accurate Genesis emulators. If there are such for the SNES, wouldn't it make sense to hack the emulator first to see what effect overclocking particular components will have?

Re:Emulation

[Jagasian]

Cycle-accurate Genesis emulation? I've never seen it. Care to elaborate? There is only one cycle-accurate SNES emulator, bsnes, and it is fairly new and extremely resource intensive. For some reason, internet saavy people put give far more credit to the accuracy of console emulation than is justified by the actual accuracy of console emulation. Few emulators are as accurate as many would like to believe. For example, most console emulators would be completely unable to win a "Turing-test" like comparison between real hardware and the emulator.

From the looks of this mod, it appears as if it would be far easier to see what would happen by modifying the hardware, as opposed to modifying a supposedly cycle-accurate emulator, as the emulator might not be setup for such modification, and it might contain bugs that would lead the experiment to the wrong conclusion.

On a related note, Nestopia is a NES emulator that takes accuracy seriously. It goes beyond being just cycle-accurate, as it goes as far as to emulate the analog video signal generated by the NES's digital-to-analog converter, which turns the NES's frame buffer into a human visible video signal. Hence a side-by-side comparison of a real NES hooked up to the PC via a TV-tuner or video capture card, and the emulator running on the same PC... even a hardcore NES fan will have difficulty telling the difference. Check out a screen capture comparison of a real NES, Nestopia, and FCE Ultra.

Test it out for yourself. Follow that last link and try to determine which screenshot is a real NES and which screenshot is Nestopia. Meanwhile, the screenshot of FCE Ultra sticks out like a sore thumb, even though it is comparable to what many consider to be highly accurate console emulation.

Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[user24]

I'm sickened by the amount of people on here saying "... but why?".

Why?? WHY?? Because he's a GEEK, Dammit! Just because it doesn't have a buzzword associated with it, or because it's not to do with google, or didn't come out in the last 15 minutes, doesn't mean it's not cool.

*wanders off mumbling about these younguns..*

Re:Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[elgatozorbas]

I'm sickened by the amount of people on here saying "... but why? Why?? WHY?? Because he's a GEEK, Dammit!".

Not agreed. I don't know why so many replies have been modded toll. 'Why' is a completely justified question because the hack is trivial (you only have to know the pinout of the processor), not particularly elegant and doesn't serve an obvious goal. It is an insult to real hacks, be them in software (e.g. trying to run Linux on everything) or hardware (e.g. making a super high-res camera of a flatbed scanner) that anything anyone does is automatically wonderful.

*wanders off mumbling about these younguns..*

Can't believe an old-schooler would be impressed with this.

Ps: don't want to bash this mod, but take it for what it is, a simple mod.

Secret of Mana

[siegesama]

This may actually be useful! There are a number of games, among them that holy-of-holies, The Secret of Mana, that during very busy scenes with all three characters and a number of enemies, will experience slow-down and flickered sprites as an error. Does a sped-up CPU do anything at all to remedy this?

Once he's got it so it's only sped (and not fucked) up, I'd love to find out if that would help prevent those slow-downs

I'll bet nobody was expecting an actual response to this story, heh

Headline should read...

[e4g4]

The headline should read: "taking a soldering iron to an snes renders it completely unplayable" ... I don't mean to bash too hard, but seriously, clock speed is something you can take as a constant for console video game development. Now, if he could get it to boot linux, and wire an ethernet cable through one of the controller ports, and play two player SNES games over the internet (in emulation), that would be cool.

End

[electrosoccertux]

Overclocking old embedded devices is like power: it is not a means, it is and end.

Next: Hot-Rodding Your 1899 Stanley Steamer!

[Nova Express]

Get that mechanical marvel up to blazing 9 MPH by modding your valves!

Next up: Adding neon to your Whitney Cotton Gin.

Re:Don't know why I'm commenting really

[proverbialcow]

It was a reasonable piece of kit for the time, but the fact remains it was a 'sweet peice of gaming machine' because of the games that were on it.

Wrong, and dead-on. The SNES was woefully underpowered next to the Genesis, TurboGrafx, Jaguar, etc. That Nintendo made intelligent design decisions to make games playable on the SNES, and leveraged their success with the 8-bit NES to lure in players and developers to begin with, made it a sweet gaming platform.

What Nintendo has always understood (Virtual Boy aside for a moment) is that the gameplay is really the most important element. That's why experiments like the DS worked. That's why the GameCube was routinely profitable, even though it was an also-ran in the marketplace.