SNES Overclocking Project

[Epicenter]

Good news and bad news. The good news is, thanks to the generosity of Jonjandran, I've isolated what needs to be done to overclock the machine from the normal ~2.3 MHz to ~4.4 MHz.

The bad news, in the process, a power short caused the test machine go to up in smoke. If anyone wants to contribute a SNES unit (no accessories/games required) I'd be most appreciative. I'll complete the project and post my results here. I'd buy one myself but, I'm a poor college student. I can't really afford to. :P

- Epicenter, a Console's worst nightmare ;)

[§ Gideon §]

*holds SNES tightly* Get away from my baby!

[buttasuperb]

Sounds cool, but I only got one snes here.

[aaron_157]

Wow after u complete it you should let us know how to step buy step do it, I am very interested in this. Sorry man, I only have one snes though.

[Epicenter]

Once I have a machine I will take photos and publish a full How-To guide, step by step, so anyone could do it. I'm too poor to buy an SNES though.

[Epicenter]

If anyone can contribute Paypal $, and enough people can chip in, I'll just snag one off of Ebay.

[Ed Oscuro]

Wow, your skills never cease to amaze me :D

I'd like to think of myself as a supporter of this endeavor 100% (and $100 as well, heh) but I really can't spare any cash, unless we get enough other folks to chip in that I'd only be paying a couple dollars...

[Epicenter]

If you wanted to chip in $2 .. Every little bit helps. *shrug* My paypal account is epicenter@adelphia.net if anyone gives a damn ;D

[kai123]

I have an original model that has the power connector thing broke off. I don't know if it works I will test it in the morning. If it does it is yours for the price of shipping. Got to go get some -_- -_- -_-

[Epicenter]

Sounds good, but it'd need to be VERY inexpensive shipping. I'm too poor. ;D By power connector .. you mean the pin in the power connector? or the jack *broke off* inside the machine? ;P In either case, that is OK, I can work around that and just wire up power directly to the board ..

[The Unknown Gamer]

I have a really dumb question - What are you expecting to get from overclocking a SNES?

[Oobgarm]

I have a really dumb question - What are you expecting to get from overclocking a SNES?

I'm with ya on that question. Maybe I missed it somewhere.

[YoshiM]

I have a really dumb question - What are you expecting to get from overclocking a SNES?

I'm guessing to minimize slow down issues. I'm wondering if overall speed will be affected, meaning every game will play faster.

[badinsults]

Most snes games rely on exact timing, so overclocking a snes would likely not play correctly. I mean, if it worked, snes emulators would do it.

[SoulBlazer]

I think that's one reason that he's interested in doing this project -- to see what effect that it would have.

[Jorpho]

Did you miss the earlier threads about the overclocked NES and the overclocked Genesis? Both reportedly turned out quite well, with tangible results.

[Epicenter]

Yesh, they did. The NES boosted from 1.79 to 2.36 MHz caused a near elimination of slowdown. Kirby was the only game I couldn't completely fix, I'll have to try and push it further. Once that's perfected a bit more I will show you guys that, and make a full project page, photos, etc. for it. The MegaDrive/Genesis made it from 8 to *16* MHz with no problems, but ALL lag was removed from EVERY game without fail. There was only one occasion which caused the entire game to push beyond its proper speed; the Sonic 2 Special Stages, and they only did this beyond 13 MHz. In fact, I'd argue that they playe better 33% faster, myself.

As for the precise timing issues-- I've sure as hell not been seeing any. It seems most consoles are willing to put up with this. I know the SMS isn't, though-- it has MAJOR graphical problems due to CPU/Video synchronization requirements.

[bargora]

So how much does it cost to lay hold of a SNES around where you live? I'm curious to see how this turns out, and I wonder how much you'd have to raise. Maybe DP could let you run a pledge drive on the front page?

I mean, this is science, dammit!

[number6]

I found the Genesis thread, but the site with the video was down when I checked. I have a hard time believing that you can double the clock speed without problems. If this was such an easy thing to do why didn't Sega clock the chips at 16Mhz then? The same would hold true for the SNES. I believe the SNES had to be clocked at the speed it was set at because the power requirements would go up if you wanted to run at a higher clock speed.

How exactly do you overclock an SNES/Genesis/NES in the first place? I can't imagine production runs of the systems had jumpers on them and there isn't any software to run to allow you to change the voltage.

I did a quick search on the internet and could find no info on other people doing what is being talked about here so I must say if it is for real you are quite the hardware wizard. I am sure you could go to your college computer engineering department head and explain your project. I am sure they would be very interested in this project and would be willing to handle the minimal expenses needed if all you need is an SNES.

[number6]

oops double post. sorry

[Epicenter]

I have a hard time believing that you can double the clock speed without problems. If this was such an easy thing to do why didn't Sega clock the chips at 16Mhz then? The same would hold true for the SNES.

Well, I had a hard time believing it too. You need to boot at 8 MHz and then halt and switch into 16 for it to work, but after that, it runs just fine. The reason Sega/Nintendo didn't clock their chips higher was because of cost. It's unprofessional to sell a chip rated for 8, running at 16, MHz. The 16 MHz variety cost a ton, like buying an Athlon 64 instead of an Athlon XP, for example .. and that made the actual product cost more in stores, which scared off customers. Nintendo built the SNES to be cheap. Every part in it is budget and comprimised, so why bother with a good CPU speed? ;)


How exactly do you overclock an SNES/Genesis/NES in the first place? I can't imagine production runs of the systems had jumpers on them and there isn't any software to run to allow you to change the voltage.

I'm still making the full writeup, with photos and the whole bit, but the basic idea is to cut off the existing clock signal source and feed in a new one. To change speeds while it is running, you need to halt the chip so it won't keep trying to operate during the instant when it has no clock. The specific fashion in which you need to do this on each machine is different.


I did a quick search on the internet and could find no info on other people doing what is being talked about here so I must say if it is for real you are quite the hardware wizard. I am sure you could go to your college computer engineering department head and explain your project.

Not a wizard by any definition of the word if you ask me .. but I try to be good at as much as I can. I personally think software is more my niche. As for funding from my school, well, it's hard for us to get funding to keep the buildings from falling down. In any case they would never accept any proposition if they knew it was about a game system, scientific for not. :P You know how administrations are.

I have the Power adapter, RFU, Mario World, Turtles in Time, and a controller thanks to Jojandran. I just need a new system unit and some lag-prone games. SMW is pretty well coded so I could only pick out a couple of laggy spots. If I'm going to make videos, I'll need a wider range of things to show at the different clockrates. Around here a SNES is probably around $20-$25 depending on where I go. GameStop will insist on pushing up the price to $25 for the cables and power brick and so forth .. and the Evil Fascist Game Shop From Hell will give me such a hassle I want to avoid them entirely.

As for the videos, during an update I took them down from the site .. then I had to reformat my hard disk and forgot to back them up. Sucks for me. ;) I'll have to recapture them once I'm done adding the other clock speeds to the MegaDrive .. but suffice to say they show a complete speedup. No lag whatsoever in Sonic 2 Mystic Cave Zone (2-player) or numerous stressful sequences in Ecco: Tides of Time.

Ouch, that was a long post.

[Epicenter]

Huh, scratch that! Jojandran, God of Generosity, is mailing me another SNES and a copy of StarFox. ;D

If anyone wants to contribute more lag prone games though, I would definitely appreciate that. I seem to recall Raiden lag, does anyone have that?

[Ze_ro]

If this was such an easy thing to do why didn't Sega clock the chips at 16Mhz then? The same would hold true for the SNES.

Well, to really understand this, you should know how manufacturers label their chips in the first place... lets say Intel makes a huge batch of their latest processor. What they do is test them all at a fairly low clock speed (Basically, the lowest that they could make a profit off of), say 1GHz... anything that doesn't work is thrown out... they then increase the clock speed (perhaps up to 1.2GHz). Any chips that stop working at this step are labelled as 1GHz chips, and sold as such. They then increase the clock speed again (perhaps 1.4GHz)... any chips that stop working at this step would be labelled as 1.2GHz chips, and sold at a slightly higher price than the 1GHz chips. The reason certain batches of chips run better than others is probably due to extremely minute imperfections in the manufacturing process. (There's probably a lot more complexity to their tests than just what I've said, but that's the gist of it anyways)

So you see, pretty much all the 68000's out there are essentially the same. It's just that the ones that were sold as 16 MHz chips had survived a longer battery of tests than the 8 MHz ones, and were deemed to run at 16 MHz reliably. Running the 8 MHz chips at a higher clock speed is kind of a risk... chip manufacturers are a bit lenient with their labelling (if it's labelled at 8 MHz, it has to be able to tolerate that speed perfectly, so it's probably at least a little better than 8 MHz) so it might work fine at a higher clock speed, but then again, it might overheat and become unreliable. It's the same dillema that affects people who overclock their computers... overclock it 20-25% and you're usually fine... overclock it too much and you can melt the chip. I had a 90MHz Pentium that I overclocked way back when... at 100MHz, it was perfectly fine... at 120MHz, it would cause random crashes and lockups (It didn't cause any permanent damage though).

It's a neat idea to try this with a game system, but I don't think I'd try it with my own. I'm not confident that a 16MHz Genesis would last me nearly as long as my normal 8MHz one. Getting rid of the small amount of slowdown in some games isn't worth halving the life span of my system in my opinion.

I'm curious to see what would happen with some of the oddities out there though... like what happens with SuperFX games in an overclocked SNES? (Does the SuperFX multiply the SNES's clock signal, or does it have it's own oscillator?) What will happen with a Super Gameboy in an overclocked SNES? Have you tried Virtua Racing in your overclocked Genesis?

--Zero

[number6]

Epicenter :

Well I wish you luck in your experimenting. It will be interesting to see the results though I doubt it is something any of us here would be capable of duplicating. I am pretty good with a soldering iron myself, but I would not want to risk ruining my functioning SNES. The only time I dig in the guts of any system is when it stops working.


Ze_ro:


Would not this be better tested using one of the emulators out there? That's assuming the source code is available. You could simulate overclocking in software to see the effects on different games I would think. I certainly am not very knowledgeable about this sort of thing though I have overclocked PC's before. I usually don't do it anymore because like you said it shortens the life span of the CPU significantly plus there can be stability problems that are hard to troubleshoot.

[Ze_ro]

Would not this be better tested using one of the emulators out there? That's assuming the source code is available.

You certainly could. There are plenty of open-source emulators out there for just about any system. I don't know how hard it would be to make this change in snes9x or ZSNES (Considering all the goofy hardware they support, it might break other things). The only emulator I know of off-hand that allows you to overclock chips is MAME. I suppose by extension, MESS is probably capable of doing this too. You could always ask the snes9x or ZSNES teams to try adding this feature if you want... it would definitely be an interesting and worthwhile addition, so they'd probably listen.

However, it's always cooler to see hardware hacks than software hacks. That's just an opinion though.

[edit: It might already be possible to overclock snes9x and ZSNES with some command line options. My computer is just barely fast enough to do full speed emulation as it is though, so I doubt overclocking would be at all noticable for me. snes9x has an option where you can specify what percentage of cpu cycles to execute every scanline, and I think you can bump it over 100%.]

--Zero

[Epicenter]

Seeing as CPUs tend to keep the same lifespan no matter how far you push them, odds are the chip running at 16 MHz at all times would still outlive any of us. ;) I've not heard of a CPU dying of old age since .. well .. ever.

Also, the 68000 never goes far beyond room temperature, even at 16, so it's not like you need to stick a copper sink on it, followed by a fan the size of Cuba, then hook up an alcohol bath to submerge it in, and .. ;)

Besides, you pick the speed, so you don't need to worry about crashes .. the present setup I am building has switches to turn on clock generators for various speeds, so you can boot at 8 and move up and determine what works best on what games. You can also change speeds after boot.

As long as you are careful and follow the directions to the letter it's really pretty hard to damage your console. :D

[Nick Goracke]

You do realize you could be selling this service rather than begging for money, right? ;)

[Epicenter]

How much would you guys be willing to pay for:

An MD overclocked to 12 MHz
An NES overclocked to 2.7 MHz
A SNES overclocked to 4.3 MHz?

You'd mail it to me, I'd OC it and mail it back.

Installing switches and the like would drive me nuts as my mechanical skills are crap. I'd have to just have little switches hanging out the side of the machine. I could just clock it to the above speeds where all games should run problem free.

If no one would pay.. so what. I am happy providing the info free.

[evilmess]

I know your money situation is tight but I'd suggest that you pick up a half dozen Genesis consoles since they are so plentiful and cheap.

Overclock and sell'em to us for a profit. That way you can get a few in the real world working in real world conditions. If your work is solid and the results are positve I'm sure you'll gain a good reputation from the praise of those early adopters of your work.

Turn the money you make back into your fledgling little business/hobby and do it again as well as offer the service to gamers thru a web site where you can also distibute the step by step plans for each console.

I think what you're doing is pretty cool and I'd be interested in an overclocked Genny. :)

[hu6800]

How much would you guys be willing to pay for:

An MD overclocked to 12 MHz
An NES overclocked to 2.7 MHz
A SNES overclocked to 4.3 MHz?

You'd mail it to me, I'd OC it and mail it back.

Installing switches and the like would drive me nuts as my mechanical skills are crap. I'd have to just have little switches hanging out the side of the machine. I could just clock it to the above speeds where all games should run problem free.

If no one would pay.. so what. I am happy providing the info free.

Im almost tempted to send you a turbografx 16.

[badinsults]

I still don't think it will work well. For every game that slowdown is fixed, more games will have screwed up timing because data is being accessed too fast for the cart to handle. If it were something that was effective, do you not think Nintendo would have done it?

[Epicenter]

I still don't think it will work well. For every game that slowdown is fixed, more games will have screwed up timing because data is being accessed too fast for the cart to handle. If it were something that was effective, do you not think Nintendo would have done it?

We've been through this. :) On the MegaDrive and NES, there are NO timing problems, and if sync problems do occur it's not with the cartridge, it's with the video processors. Yet, the ONLY place I've had glitching is the Sonic 2 special stages, and that's ONLY at 13 and 16 MHz.

Nintendo is not about to put overclocked chips in their machines-- it's unprofessional and if something went wrong (unlikely), they would be blamed and get a bad reputation for it. They'd get higher rated chips .. and those would cost more. The SNES is all about money. Very little of it. ;)

[Epicenter]

I'd be happy to try the TurboGrafx-16, if you would be willing to send one. *Shrug*

[Epicenter]

Opening a new topic now for sales.

[Bratwurst]

What is your opinion on swapping out the current processors with higher rated CPUs that in theory, Nintendo or Sega could have used barring the higher cost of the console at retail?

[Epicenter]

If the only thing you are changing is the MHz rating of the chip, that will be fine, you can certainly do that and it will probably increase stability. But crashing has not been a problem in this regard.

From a feasability standpoint though, it's a nightmare to swap chips with 64 or more pins on them. :o

[Ze_ro]

I seem to remember reading about a guy who replaced the 68000 in the Jaguar with a 68020... I forget how it turned out, but he said Hover Strike was quite nice while it lasted.

--Zero

[jonjandran]

What is your opinion on swapping out the current processors with higher rated CPUs that in theory, Nintendo or Sega could have used barring the higher cost of the console at retail?

Dang......That's something even I wouldn't try.

Have you seen how small those cpu pins are. And those small traces would probably pull up on a 10-15 year old motherboard.

Yikes !!!!! @_@ @_@ @_@

[jonjandran]

Installing switches and the like would drive me nuts as my mechanical skills are crap. I'd have to just have little switches hanging out the side of the machine. I could just clock it to the above speeds where all games should run problem free.
.

A small toggle switch from Radio Shack and a 1/8 inch drill.
That's all there is to a switch install.

Drill the hole and put the switch in and then screw the provided nut on the back side and then solder your 2 wires.

That's it. :D

[Bratwurst]

Have you seen how small those cpu pins are. And those small traces would probably pull up on a 10-15 year old motherboard.

I've done surface mount stuff before and have access to a hot air station so removal wouldn't be so bad. I agree that redoing each pin would take a long time though and it'd be more a flight of fancy than anything else.

[whoisKeel]

if it ends up working, you must try castlevania iv...that game has horrid slowdown all over the place...i'd love to play it w/o

[Laggerzero]

I was helping epicenter out when the board blew and it is partially my fault. I got zapped a few hours before in my Digital lab so I was a little uneasy grounding wires by holding them with my hands.

[hu6800]

Opening a new topic now for sales.

I would,, you only live once and id like to see a tg16 on steroids haha.
Im expecting 3 spare units next week, ill send you two.
one for me , one for you .
overclock them bitches to death please.

[Epicenter]

** IMPORTANT **

I caught a post on Buying and Selling from a person thinking I was charging money for the procedure and not providing the info .. the info WILL be free. I'm building a photographic HTML how-to guide, but it's gonna take some time. Please don't get the wrong idea. ;)

[Epicenter]

** IMPORTANT **

I caught a post on Buying and Selling from a person thinking I was charging money for the procedure and not providing the info .. the info WILL be free. I'm building a photographic HTML how-to guide, but it's gonna take some time. Please don't get the wrong idea. Angry posts are discouraging, yaknow?

[Ed Oscuro]

Agreed. Take your time, good sir :)

By the way, anybody want to venture a guess as to what games would be helped out most by this upgrade (besides Contra Force, of course)? :D

[sloan]

Does anyone know how this project turned out, and did OP end up posting instructions anywhere on internet?

I love mode 7 SNES sports games like NCAA Basketball and Stanley Cup. but man are they slow. An overclocked SNES console to play these on would be sweet indeed.

[Sysop]

Does anyone know how this project turned out, and did OP end up posting instructions anywhere on internet?

I love mode 7 SNES sports games like NCAA Basketball and Stanley Cup. but man are they slow. An overclocked SNES console to play these on would be sweet indeed.
All I could find was this archived page about it. (http://web.archive.org/web/20060511035731/http://www.99-gtp.com/ucm/snesoc.htm)