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by gkhartman 1 day ago
Reminds me of a NES that I overclocked when I was around 14 years old. It was the sort of silly thing a nerdy kid would do with too much free time on their hands, and didn't do much to improve the system. Most of the time it caused more issues than it fixed, but it was a good learning experience.

This is far more exciting, since it adds functionality to they system. Maybe I'll dust off my old hacked up NES and do this at some point. If only I had the free time these days.

Thx for sharing :)

1 comments

What did it improve? Sprite flicker? Slow down? I'd no idea this was possible on real hardware!
Overclocking won't help with sprite flicker. Sprite flicker happens because the PPU will only evaluate the 8 frontmost sprites active on a line.

Sometimes you get sprites disappearing by priority, sometimes the software will alternate active sprites; software sprite disabling in some titles is probably harsher than needed (might flicker when there's more than X sprites on the screen, even if there is never more than 8 on one line)

Should be able to fix a bunch of stuff. Slowdowns, missed frames, etc.

The game only has a limited amount of time to do all of its logic before the VSYNC interrupt forces it to draw to the screen. Game have different ways of handling this, e.g. by rolling back and abandoning the changes, drawing whatever they have, etc.

A faster clock should make it s/t games that don't always get done in time should at least have a better chance.