Overclocked an N64 last night, details inside..

[phresh]

After seeing that this was possible, me and a friend finally decided to give it a go last night.....

It should be noted that neither of us are experienced solderers so how on god's earth we got it to work is beyond me. Especially considering the soldering iron we were using was probably older that the original pong, let alone the N64 we were working on.

It probably took about 2 1/2 hours to get it all soldered and the heatsink back on (if anyone trys it i'd recommend just using pc ramsinks/mobo sinks and not bothering putting it back on). There were some pretty dodgy solder joints and some rather hairy moments when pulling cables through the RFI rejecting cover. We installed 2 switches that allowed us to switch between the 4 possible clocks (1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x).

Anyway, we reassembled it all, bar the top cover and plugged it all in with just a touch of nervousness. We started off with Buck Bumble (didn't want to blow a decent game if it didn't work) on the 1.5x multiplier (this is the N64's normal speed) and it booted fine.

Knowing it worked we now moved onto Goldeneye. Played a bit of 3 player at normal speed (rockets, archives) with all the usual slowdown. We then stuck it on the 2x multiplier and OH MY GOD. It runs a lot faster, and with a considerably smoother framerate (tested this by running through flames!). It also speeds up the 1 player quite considerably, but it's slightly unusual. We timed short runs on the Dam to find out that it speed up the actual in game time. What we timed as 8 seconds was shown in game as 12 seconds. Although it didn't seem to speed up everything as the truck was still travelling at the same speed. Definately adds an extra edge to the multiplayer though.

It was getting late by now so we just thought we'd try Road Rash 64 which has got a shocking framerate. It gave the framerate a significant boost again. Certainly more playable than before.

This was done on just a standard black PAL N64, although it hasn't been played for any great length yet so we'll have too see ho it fares in a long Goldeneye session!

All in all it's probably a pretty pointless excercise, especially with the rev being backwards compatible, but hey not many people can say they own one!!

[Duddyroar]

Impressive! Thanks for sharing that with us!

Very interesting to hear this sorts out frame rate problems. I'd love to play a super-speed Goldeneye myself.

The good thing is that N64 consoles can be gotten fairly cheaply so you don't feel as bad if you wreak one...

[strawdonkey]

What happened with the 3X Multiplier? Toast start flying out of the N64 or something?

[phresh]

Yeah my mate paid ?9 for his but that was with a pad etc. You could easily pick them up for a fiver each console only i expect. To be honest it wasn't so much the cost we were worried about it ws the 3 hours spent doing it!!

Ahh yeah, I forgot to mention the 3x multiplier. We only tried it once on Goldeneye and it never booted. As expected really. No burning or anything though, just no boot up at all. Worked fine when switched back. We also haven't tried the underclock yet, we're gonna try that next time round.

We're going to try and give the console a more extensive run-out somewhen this week and test some more games (including perfect dark).

If NTSC machines were cheap we'd try it on one of those too so we could have a bit of a comparison (plus RGB would be nice and easy to do while you're in there).

I'll see if I can get any videos, although don't hold your breath....

[nekroxide]

Sort of related, but did anyone ever have 'problems' with PAL 4 player Mario Kart 64?

We used to play this religiously when I was at uni, and every now and again (on Bowser's Castle & Banshee Boardwalk especially) the game would speed up significantly. It was like the differenct between 50 cc and 150 cc! Half the time the game would crash before the race ended, though.

(Sorry for the thread hijack)

[Leon Retro]

I read once that the snes can be modified to always run in hi-res mode.

Has anyone ever done it?

[anephric]

If NTSC machines were cheap we'd try it on one of those too so we could have a bit of a comparison (plus RGB would be nice and easy to do while you're in there).

My friendly neighborhood market trader has a stack of NTSC N64s that he sticks out for ?10 each. Don't get much cheaper... nobody wants 'em.

[phresh]

Yeah, unfortunately are local market traders only tend to have broken NES's! Might have to go a bit further afield and find some.

[IcePak]

Nice. Pretty cool idea, and I'm intrugued by the fact that it worked so well. I wonder what it would have been like had their been an official addon for something like this. I love being able to experience games that had some problems with frame-rate, etc and being able to play them when these flaws are ironed out by overclocking or better hardware. It's like what 16-bit emulation did for some of my favourite games from those days.

I'd love to see if people could do the same sort of thing with the Saturn that was done here.

[m0nk3y]

Sort of related, but did anyone ever have 'problems' with PAL 4 player Mario Kart 64?

We used to play this religiously when I was at uni, and every now and again (on Bowser's Castle & Banshee Boardwalk especially) the game would speed up significantly. It was like the differenct between 50 cc and 150 cc! Half the time the game would crash before the race ended, though.

(Sorry for the thread hijack)

Yeah, PAL MK64 does some strange things. On my mate's PAL n64, the Donkey Kong's Jungle track ran at an unbelievable speed, on 2player! Whereas other tracks were sloooow, far slower then 17% anyhow.

Back on topic, this sounds like a fun mod. Might have a crack with my PAL n64. If it goes ok, I'll get an NTSC one and get RGB on that too.

[Leon Retro]

Pal MarioKart64 was optimised for 50hz- with things being made to move faster. I think it runs really strangely when put in an NTSC machine.

[phresh]

We had a bit of a play around yesterday to try and better guage what was happening. We tried Perfect Darks co-op mode and although it made it much faster, the fream rate was still pretty poor and quite variable as it is at normal speed. We tried Road Rash again (actually good fun in multiplayer) on all working clock speeds. Underclock was just stupidly slow and boring, normal was obviously normal, but overclocked it is ace. Much faster and the frame rate seems a little better.

We are just assuming that all the overclock is doin is actually increasing frames per second in scale, not by adding frames. Essentially the same as the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz games, except with a bit extra.