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!

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?

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

Experienced hacker?

[elgatozorbas]

Nice to see anyone is busy with hardware for a change but what have we come to if this hack is frontpage news on /.??? The guy just changed the clock to whatever random one he had lying around. I derive this from two facts:

- apparently the system does not run very stable
- he is rather desperate to get an oscillator in between 35 and 25 MHz. You can just _buy_ these things in most electronics part shops and I can think of at least four people including myself who have a high chance of having one in their garbage collection.

On top of this it would surprise me if he was a very experienced electronics hacker as those would never punt ground high and power low in circuit (of course I don't know him).

Kudos to the guy, but get real people: he changed an oscillator. That's it.

Re:Amusing but impractical

[Dwedit]

All the consoles know when the signal for the TV has reached VBLANK, so they use that to synchronize. Only badly made games would use decrement loops to count time, when you have a steady 60Hz timer already. This caused problems when games were brought to Europe, with their 50Hz TVs.

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.