Starfox 1 and 2 new overclock mod

[Drakon]

Using a combination of the right hardware and slight reprogramming of the game roms, I got both starfox 1 and 2 overclocked way faster than before on a real superfx cartridge in a stock snes.

Starfox 1 57 mhz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcw3O7aTgo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqi1aow6GZI

Starfox 2 53.3 mhz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4pm8WCtGX0

To put it into perspective the default speed for these games is 21.4 mhz.

[trap15]

Fantastic work!

[lettuce]

So what does this mod actually achieve, just to make the game run faster than it was designed to or does it increase fps as well (hard to tell from YouTube)? In which case I don't see the real life use for this but as a technical achievement it is impressive. Now what would be idle would be the smoothness of the mod but keeping the gameplay speed the same as originally intended by Nintendo

Are you going to post a guide on how to carry out this mod, and will it work on Stunt Rce FX as i have a spare cart of that

[Ed Oscuro]

It certainly still seems playable, and more so due to the extra FPS even if the timing looks too fast (compared to the really painfully obvious throttling of the original at points). I wouldn't be surprised if some of these games were developed with some thought to using faster chips. Maybe bad bins caused them to go with a slower clock speed?

RIP Ben Cheese.

Bonus: Read all of Slippy's comments as the cartridge running at the default speed to the cartridge running at the new speed Peppy: Get lost, you fiend!

[Drakon]

Are you going to post a guide on how to carry out this mod, and will it work on Stunt Rce FX as i have a spare cart of that

http://16bitgamer.forumotion.ca/t3-star ... erfx-games

[hakujin]

Thumbs up for the engineering that went in to this. I wish the animation system wasn't based on the framerate so it would scale correctly. Is the music faster too? Maybe the next step is to bring this over to http://board.byuu.org/ and ask him (author of bsnes) about possibly decoupling framerate from engine animation? Worst case you'd find quite a bit more knowledge of what the IRQ stuff actually does.

[Drakon]

Thumbs up for the engineering that went in to this. I wish the animation system wasn't based on the framerate so it would scale correctly. Is the music faster too? Maybe the next step is to bring this over to http://board.byuu.org/ and ask him (author of bsnes) about possibly decoupling framerate from engine animation? Worst case you'd find quite a bit more knowledge of what the IRQ stuff actually does.

The music isn't faster. Only the superfx chip is overclocked music is done by the snes itself which is stock. I just managed to get starfox 1 running stable at 60 mhz (maybe even faster but I need to order faster oscillators) using a different type of eprom that has a faster access time by 5ns. The rom chip I'm using is faster than the ram chip by 20 ns so obviously rom access speed is very important.

[Ed Oscuro]

Are the overlay graphics (Slippy's stupid face, text, etc.) generated by the SNES itself? Also, are the completed 3D graphic frames transferred to the SNES via the bus?

[trap15]

I believe the way that it works is that you set up a Background layer to use a series of tiles, and the SuperFX will generate those tiles on-the-fly. So each tile gets re-rendered each frame.

The only thing the SuperFX is rendering is the 3D graphics, and everything else generated SNES side. The way it works allows you to put the 3D layer at any "height" in the final screen render.

[opt2not]

Nice job Drakon, if I were to send you a starfox cart, would you be willing to do this mod for me?

[broken harbour]

Nice job Drakon, if I were to send you a starfox cart, would you be willing to do this mod for me?

Same here..

[Drakon]

Are the overlay graphics (Slippy's stupid face, text, etc.) generated by the SNES itself? Also, are the completed 3D graphic frames transferred to the SNES via the bus?

Yes I'm fairly certain all 2d images are generated by the snes itself. When studying with a debugger I noticed when a superfx game runs it's constantly changing video modes for every frame, I suppose that's it generating the 2d and 3d images separately. I'm not completely sure but it's a good hunch. The overclock mod works like a charm for superfx games nothing really glitches out and the control response time speeds up just as much as the gameplay so all games remain perfectly playable. A big part of the breakthrough was reprogramming the game rom to set certain hardware modes in the superfx chip to allow it to overclock significantly more.

Nice job Drakon, if I were to send you a starfox cart, would you be willing to do this mod for me?

This mod doesn't work on starfox carts it only works with certain donor carts. Stunt race fx is currently the best known donor it includes a battery circuit and a ram chip that handles overclocking better. Also since the game rom itself needs to be slightly reprogrammed to run faster you can't use the original maskrom either, also the original maskroms most likely don't run fast enough to overclock to these speeds.