Overclock your NES

Did a search and didn't find this. If it's a repost, then sorry.

Overclock NES

Basically a how-to guide to overclock your old NES system. Interesting indeed. The guy claims that a lot of slowdown is fixed.

wow! so in other words you can actully play super dodgeball?!

Taken from the site regarding results:
Super Mario Bros.
This game ran fine up to about 4.0 MHz when the graphics went insane. It maintained stability no matter what. I couldn't get it to crash except going past that.

Super Mario Bros. 3
This also ran nicely, but the graphics went nuts around 3.6 MHz. It maxed out around 4.2 MHz, but wouldn't crash unless pushed further.

Kirby's Adventure
This game lags like mad all the time, so the gameplay is actually noticably slower at the stock speed. Using the abilities like Fire and Spark, especially around enemies using them as well, can grind the game to a halt. At 3.0 MHz or so the lag was pretty much entirely removed, and gameplay smoothed out tremendously. Around 3.4 MHz however, the graphical corruption became very, very bad. The status bar at the bottom of the screen started to rise up onto the game area. The higher the clock, the higher it went, blocking out my view of the game. Then the topmost sprite layer started to go insane around 4.0 MHz. The game kept running stably in the background though.

Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers
It's very hard to find lag in this game, but there are a few distinct points. These were smoothed out at 2.3-2.6 MHz, but the game ran stable up to 4.4 MHz. Past 4.0 MHz however, the sprite layer went nuts like the other games, with random tiles flashing everywhere. No crashes however!

...

Bizarre.

It sounds interesting, and may do this to a one of my 5 NES frontloadiers, but as I see it, sometimes the slowdown is an essential character trait of the particular game title. Don't you think? I can think of many instances where I expected the reliable game slowdown.

[quote name='lurknomore']It sounds interesting, and may do this to a one of my 5 NES frontloadiers, but as I see it, sometimes the slowdown is an essential character trait of the particular game title. Don't you think? I can think of many instances where I expected the reliable game slowdown.[/quote]

Agreed. Often times slow downs come when you're about to get confronted by a lot of enemies! It's like "fixing" your NES to not get rid of enemies when you back up and push them off-screen. Neat project, though if that's a peeve you have.

you could get the NES to lag like crazy in Legend of Zelda by bringing a bunch of statues to life.

I for one can't stand the lag of the puny NES processor. You'd of thought they would have addrssed the hardware deficiency when they released the SNES...but I guess they thought the same thing; it's reliable. Reliably irritating during a game of Star Fox. Bastards. If it weren't a hassle I'd bother with doing the mod.

cool

Will overclocking my NES void its warranty?

Interesting...

[quote name='int80h']Will overclocking my NES void its warranty?[/quote]

That's pretty interesting. I actually would have thought that, with fixed hardware, they'd have simply hard-coded the speed of the games (like old badly-written PC games did, so that they're unplayably fast on modern machines.) Nintendo seems to have actually been thinking ahead right from the very beginning.

If this works, it would be nice if someone would build a feature like this into an NES emulator (maybe they already have and I just haven't heard about it.) It seems like with an emulator, you could speed up the SPU without affecting the sound. Be nice if someone would figure out a way to fix flicker, too