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!

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.

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..*

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.

Re:An A for the effort

[zome]

if you have to ask for the purpose, you probably won't understand it anyway :-)

End

[electrosoccertux]

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

Re:Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[masklinn]

A True Geek would've waited till he had a fully functional overclocked SNES.

And would've benched his improved SNES against a regular one, too.

Not "What Purpose" ... "Wrong Purpose"

[bmac83]

Your point is understandable, but I think you are missing a key idea: I don't think nerds really appreciate something technologically if it involves destroying a perfectly good piece of equipment. If I wrote up an article about modding an Xbox 360 into a totally awesome endtable that fell over every time I put a can of coke on the edge of it, that would probably piss most nerds off.

Nerds see the potential in things. An ordinary person looks at a 400MHz computer with a faulty power supply and sees something heading to the junkyard. I might see it as a mailserver, after I put some work into it. If you take a good piece of hardware and mess it up to the point that it won't even hold a stable image from a game, you just destroyed a lot of potential.

Video Sync - 3.58MHz

[Anonymous Coward]

My melano-deficient caucasoid friend. I believe your problem is that the SNES PPU is set to run at 3.58MHz, which is the NTSC frequency. Running the CPU faster is going to screw things up. Not sure, entirely the setup of the SNES architecture, between the CPU and PPU, and what exactly you're over-clocking. But the TV signal generated by the PPU must be closely at 3.58MHz (NTSC), otherwise you're out of sync, and would get a B/W signal (since the TV wouldn't lock onto the Color burst phase refence in the Hsync signal) - if slightly off phase, or flickering if very out of phase. From the looks of things it seems, you're still getting color and a rather normal picture (PPU is running independetly of CPU clock rate). The problem therefore is that the games, atleast most of them, are trying to perform operations at the Hsync (Sprite position/attribute manipulations), and due to the speed and resultance phase difference between the two systems, you're getting these glitches. I'd recommend you study the archietecture that you're overclocking, and write a simple program (say a super mario world clone) designed around the new speed. This should be an easy feat, assuming you have programming skills atleast.

Interesting, anthropologically, you appear of an atlanto-mediterranid celtic stock, either of iberian or british isles ancestries. You also show a pinkalictic accretion in your complexion. Awesome :D

Re:Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[Guppy06]

"Dammit! Just because it doesn't have a buzzword associated with it"

But the article does have a buzzword: overclock. And that's all the article is about, typical geeky dick-waving that accomplishes little else. What's the next submission going to be? "ZOMG, I put an R-type sticker on my Honda!"

Re:Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[m50d]

But it is not cool. Simple as that. It's just dumb. Just because something takes some technical ability and involves computer parts doesn't make it cool.

Amusing but impractical

[Craig Ringer]

Consoles encourage the old school method of timer programming:

for (int i = 0; i < SOME_BIG_NUMBER; i++) { int fakeval = 0; }

In fact, I don't know how many consoles, especially old consoles, would even have a system timer, let alone one (a) sufficiently high resolution and (b) with low enough access costs to make it practical to use for game timings.

Anybody remember the "turbo" button - ie the "underclock my PC when this is off" button? That was necessary for older games written for the 80386 that assumed a small range of clock frequencies and did delays that way. You'll run into the same issue with this console - it's going to be like turning "turbo" on for an old game. Well, probably.

Re:Not "What Purpose" ... "Wrong Purpose"

[lotrtrotk]

An ordinary person looks at a 400MHz computer with a faulty power supply and sees something heading to the junkyard. I might see it as a mailserver, after I put some work into it.

If he'd modded his snes into a mailserver, we might have something really cool to talk about!!

Why is this so silly?

[dnamaners]

I see quite a few negative comments here about this and I really wonder why. When I was a student and a budding EE I used to tear apart all sorts of things and "tweak" them. I was always proud when I could get a meaningful result, an "improvement" or at lease a change that suited me (or hinted that with abit of work it could). I used to enjoy making contrived serial data transmitter adapters out of old cordless phones or other even more completely nutty things. Was I cool, probably not. Such silly junk experiments may seem simple and contrived to a real EE, but at the time I learned quite a bit from them, as much by failure as by success. As silly as it may sound in the end I really learned to properly rework and make my own simple boards. Such useful skills don't come easily to some, as many of you may know, it takes practice. Doing such projects just for fun, was if little else practice. Ultimately this curiosity taught more meaningful skills.

When I did a project well I wanted to tell others and show them, because at my level of skill it was cutting edge cool, for me. To all those that ask "why do his to a SNES?," I say this. There is no crime here, this may be one of the few simple projects that could have mass appeal to a certain subset of the slashdot crowd. Heck, thinking back, I wish I had tried doing something this cool as an undergrad. Keep up the good work.

Re:Whaddaya mean "what purpose"?

[cluening]

I think the "But why?" in this case would be expanded to "But why did you waste our time by announcing that you made your SNES run so fast that it was useless?" I could also talk about how I dropped my Newton in a puddle and now it sometimes shocks me when I turn it on, but I doubt anybody would care about that useless bit of information either.

Re:Emulation

[Jagasian]

Cycle-accurate Genesis emulation? I've never seen it. Care to elaborate? There is only one cycle-accurate SNES emulator, bsnes [wikipedia.org], 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 [sourceforge.net] 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 [xbox-scene.com] 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.

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.