overclock pal nes

Started by phreak97, July 14, 2004, 04:41:34 PM

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phreak97

seeing im in a pal country and it would cost me about $40 to get a ntsc nes over here, and there doesnt seem to be a nes 50/60 possible without an ntsc bios. i was thinking to overclock my nes to get around the slowdown produced by the 50/60 difference. i would normally just go ahead and mess around with it myself, find out what pin on the processor is the clock pin and stick a new crystal on there, see what happens. but i was talking to someone about it and he said the nes is wierd and to wait for his guide before i start if i dont want my nes to die, im not sure if he was telling the truth or not, but his sites down atm due to him wanting to pay almost nothing for a site over 4GB in size, and i already waited 6 months for this stupid guide of his and he says if he tells me how to do it before he sticks � on it, i might steal the idea and make my own site. im getting to not like him much.
anyway, would i be fine just shoving a new clock on the processor? or is he right and i have to do more?
any info would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

Aidan


The slowdown is due to a change in framerate (50Hz vs 60Hz). Unfortunately, most code is written in a way where it does all it's processing between frames, and then waits for vsync (IE, the start of a new picture) to happen before updating the screen again.

This generally means that overclocking the main processor results in the processor being able to get more done when it is processing, but doesn't fix the slowdown, as the frame rate is still 50Hz.

In order to fix it,  you need to find someway to get the sync generation to occur faster. Now, I don't know much about the specifics of the NES, so I couldn't comment on how hard that is. It's possible it could be as simple as swapping out a crystal. It's also possible that the NES can generate both sets of frequencies internally through a software programmable register. I don't know either way around!
[ Not an authoritive source of information. ]

Martin

And remember, some of the NES games in PAL areas got reissued with some code that let them run at full speed on PAL NESes (Mario Bros is one of them)
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MDX

If I remember correctly the NES has a different PAL and NTSC graphics chip so you would need to swap the chip over for it to have any effect, so probably easier to get a NTSC machine.

If you by pass the lock out and play any US game on a PAL machine that scrolls vertically it will produce garbage at the top and bottom of the screen.

Guest

Please can anyone guide me to pictures of this mysterious lock-out chip?
where is it? and where exactly is this wite to cut?