New Starfox Overclocked

[Drakon]

We stumbled across a way to get starfox 1 running perfectly at 40 mhz. Unfortunately this's the only game I could get going at this speed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47rcZa72XAw

[lwcook]

Awesome awesome work. Plan to release schematics on how it can be recreated?

[Drakon]

Awesome awesome work. Plan to release schematics on how it can be recreated?

Well let's see. There's many different starfox 1 roms floating around and it was blind luck that we found one that would overclock so fast without crashing. So you need to find the right rom and burn it to an eprom. Then you need to desolder a surface mount maskrom chip from a gsu 2 donor cart (doom is perfect for this). Then you need to wire up the tiny solder points for eprom wiring (you can find the wiring by using google that's how we found it). Then wire up the eprom. Then to perform the overclock I posted an explanation of how to do it on a couple of threads so again you can use google.

[lwcook]

Awesome awesome work. Plan to release schematics on how it can be recreated?

Well let's see. There's many different starfox 1 roms floating around and it was blind luck that we found one that would overclock so fast without crashing. So you need to find the right rom and burn it to an eprom. Then you need to desolder a surface mount maskrom chip from a gsu 2 donor cart (doom is perfect for this). Then you need to wire up the tiny solder points for eprom wiring (you can find the wiring by using google that's how we found it). Then wire up the eprom. Then to perform the overclock I posted an explanation of how to do it on a couple of threads so again you can use google.

I know the general process, I was just curious on the details of how you got it overclocked so high without crashing. I never thought it'd about changing out the rom dumps.

[Drakon]

Well the cart I was using before was a gsu 2 doom cart that had an actual nintendo starfox maskrom taken from a regular starfox 1 cartridge. However that cart once I overclocked it past 28.3 mhz the game would glitch and eventually freeze. The glitching was playable but the freezing was the big problem. The strange thing with the freezing is it wasn't at the same point sometimes I would make it much further in the game before it would freeze. I decided to take another crack and trying to solve the issue and I decided to use one of the carts we built for a commission for mucking around since my cart was a bit of a mess. I was so surprised and I cleared the game twice at 40 mhz with no issues. I tried it on another commission cart and had the same results. Then I tried my freezing cart at the same speed and sure enough it glitched and froze. Sometimes you discover these things just through dumb luck.

I really doubt that the eproms can access faster than the maskrom so I'm just assuming that the problem is solved by the particular rom dump we burned. All my starfox 2 carts use the same eproms but they glitch and freeze once I go over 33 mhz.

[Drakon]

bump: New video:

I played through the entire game start to finish at 42 mhz (2x speed)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwtrdPk ... ideo_title

[sabrage]

Drakon, you made the front page of Hackaday!
http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/overcloc ... cartridge/

[aaron]

i can't express in words how cool this really is. i'd love to play this game at this speed, i can imagine it's a lot less frustrating in parts.

[Drakon]

Drakon, you made the front page of Hackaday!
http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/overcloc ... cartridge/

Heh well I figured a little exposure never hurts. Also this's really a mod that people should see. The comments I got on this mod had a lot less trolling than the other mods I got onto hackaday.

i can't express in words how cool this really is. i'd love to play this game at this speed, i can imagine it's a lot less frustrating in parts.

It actually plays the same. It took me a bit to get used to the overall speed difference but for everything else that moves faster your arwing moves equally as fast so everything's still balanced how it was before. It's just now it runs at a nice smooth framerate 98% of the time. There's no more controller response lag since everything is running so smoothly. I think you can emulate the overclock with the right emulator but nothing beats playing it on actual hardware. I'm really glad we managed to get a cart running at its peak framerate.

[sabrage]

Drakon, you made the front page of Hackaday!
http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/overcloc ... cartridge/

Heh well I figured a little exposure never hurts. Also this's really a mod that people should see. The comments I got on this mod had a lot less trolling than the other mods I got onto hackaday.

Well, hackaday. 'Nuff said.

This is really the kind of stuff I look for on HAD anyways; the "look what I made with my $1000 3D printer!" shit doesn't really do anything for me. It was just a surprise to go through my feed and see your hack on there!