Nintendo NES Overclocking Guide 229
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
Jumpy games? (Score:2, Interesting)
What are some games that could stand to be played on an overclocked NES?
Re:Blowing is a waste of energy (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to do it all the time. Perfectly safe.
Re:ohhhh..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Other Systems (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Blowing is a waste of energy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fake Overclocking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not in the first place? (Score:3, Interesting)
OMG! Time is moving faster! (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Temperature and timing (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:A nice concept, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Blowing works, but hurts more than it helps (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Other Systems (Score:3, Interesting)
Moll.
Re:It dosen't slow down-slide show style.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:It dosen't slow down-slide show style.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What else can I overclock? (Score:2, Interesting)
Overclocking... cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [cmdrkey.com]) 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.