Starfox overclocked: James McCloud edition

A while ago I posted that overclocked starfox hits its fps limit at around 42 mhz and that the game can run fine even at 48 mhz. I've been playing starfox at 42 mhz for a long while and I'm now much more used to the speed than I used to be. I decided to try overclocking my cart past 42 mhz and see what it's like...here's the results:

Going over 42 mhz actually DOES improve the fps even more.

Playing the game at 48 mhz the game actually DOES eventually crash / glitch, so there is a limit after all.



I probably discovered these things a long time ago and lied about the effects for a few reasons:

1: The game is pretty fast at 42 mhz, I didn't want to offer a product that people would find too difficult to keep up with. The reaction speed to your controls are equally as improved so it's playable, but it really takes time to get used to the new speed.

2: The game becomes unstable at around 48 mhz, and it takes a looooot of testing to be sure that it's stable at a certain speed. I had to test it at 42 mhz for a very long time to be sure it would never crash at that speed. Since I already knew that 42 mhz was a perfectly safe speed the carts I built for customers I set at 42 mhz. I didn't have time to test the cart at faster speeds because doug had taken so long doing his part of the commission the customers were exteremely annoyed and I was just trying to get the carts out as efficiently as possible.

I must say though....going from 42 mhz to 44 mhz has quite a noticable difference things do look a lot smoother. I ordered some 45 mhz oscillators and I'm waiting for them to show up. 45 mhz is the last speed of four pin oscillator I could find between 44 and 48 mhz so it looks like either 44 or 45 mhz will be the limit of the cart.

Original starfox clock speed:

21.47727 mhz

My starfox clock speed:

44.736 mhz (with less slowdown)

The rate of framerate / game speed improvement:

x 2.0829 the original.

Having the game look like it's playing on a n64? Priceless.

Drakon wrote:

Original starfox clock speed:

21.47727 mhz

My starfox clock speed:

44.736 mhz (with less slowdown)

The rate of framerate / game speed improvement:

x 2.0829 the original.

Having the game look like it's playing on a n64? Priceless.

Just like the value menu at Wendy's

What is this edition or is James McCloud edition just joke name? Or does this differ from normal overclocked?

Arseen wrote:

What is this edition or is James McCloud edition just joke name? Or does this differ from normal overclocked?

Yeah it's just a joke name it's a bit faster than the other ones I built.

This looks great. I'm extremely impressed and jealous.

I was ordering EPROMs for my own projects when the thought came to me...

Is there any correlation between the speed of the M27C801's you're using, and the rate at which you are able to overclock your carts?

I am only able to find 100ns chips, so I am unable to test my own theory.

Cheers,

Adam

apippy wrote:

I was ordering EPROMs for my own projects when the thought came to me...

Is there any correlation between the speed of the M27C801's you're using, and the rate at which you are able to overclock your carts?

I am only able to find 100ns chips, so I am unable to test my own theory.

Cheers,

Adam

I have no idea. I know that using an eprom let me overclock starfox 1 faster than using a maskrom.

Drakon wrote:

apippy wrote:

I was ordering EPROMs for my own projects when the thought came to me...

Is there any correlation between the speed of the M27C801's you're using, and the rate at which you are able to overclock your carts?

I am only able to find 100ns chips, so I am unable to test my own theory.

Cheers,

Adam

I have no idea. I know that using an eprom let me overclock starfox 1 faster than using a maskrom.

I know that the standard speed for M27C801's is 100ns, but most guides state that you can use 100 or faster.

Just googled around for 30 seconds and it seems like the fastest version of the M27C801 is the 60ns version.

I'm in the process of making two project carts at the moment, one being a dev cart. I've used a Yoshi's Island cart as my main PCB, with the 512 SRAM chip taken from a Stunt Race PCB. My plan is to have an external socket for the EPROM, as well as a socket for the 4-pin crystal. When the cart is finished I plan on using it to test my overclocking / EPROM combinations before finalizing them into their own cart.

I'll post my results but its going to take a while as I'm waiting for parts to arrive, and I can't manage to find anyone who sells and programs M27C801's faster than 100ns. Perhaps I may look into switching to a TSOP / Adapter style mod, but I wouldnt have the first clue how to prepare the roms for that type of chip.

Regards,

Adam

Tsop you would need to buy an adapter pcb and I've never programmed them but I don't know if they're faster than eprom. The only advantage to tsop is burning roms that're larger than 8mbit since 16mbit and bigger eproms aren't pin compatible with snes carts.

Drakon wrote:

Tsop you would need to buy an adapter pcb and I've never programmed them but I don't know if they're faster than eprom. The only advantage to tsop is burning roms that're larger than 8mbit since 16mbit and bigger eproms aren't pin compatible with snes carts.

Just found some 90, 80, and 45ns M27C801 chips! I'm going to order a few of each and see if the results change.