Overclocked SuperFX games no speed limits

I romhacked the superfx games to remove code which was causing the games to crash once overclocked past a certain point. This allows me to overclock these games much higher than ever before (they run a lot smoother than when they were using double speed mode). I can now overclock the framerate of all superfx games to the point where the snes can no longer keep up.

 

"Overclocking" and "playing everything at 2x the speed" arent the same thing.

This is something you have not understood for many years.

The games do not run smoother, they just run FASTER and therefore the slow down doesnt look as noticable. But this has been mentioned many many times and you ignore it each time.

 

Is it wrong that this is the first time I've ever seen a Super FX game in motion?

Have to say I'm quite impressed (was such a Sega fanboy as a kid I never went anywhere near a SNES).

But yeah you can tell this is just running twice the speed, it does look very playable though compared to a standard speed vid I just looked up. Can't be any worse than MD Virtua Racing at 50hz.

 

The framerate is equally as sped up, how is this not smoother? Call it whatever you like, but I much prefer playing superfx games this way. The control response is equally as sped up so all these games are perfectly playable at these speeds.

 

What he's saying is it's faster, not smoother. Still looks jerky as hell to me (though still better than original), if it were higher frame rate there would be fewer leaps between one frame and the next (more frames inserted between), this looks like it's the same amount of frames but just advancing them faster. That's not a higher frame rate that's native to the game itself since the game animations still contain the same amount of frames as they did before.

I can see where you're coming from when you say higher frame rate, but technically speaking you're wrong. It's still running at the same frame rate but faster, if it were running at a higher frame rate it would be smoother but the game would run at the same speed as the original (with fewer or no jerks).

Nice video anyway, thanks for sharing...

 

Overclocking the cpu will allow it to run the code quicker, what effect that can have will depend on how the game was written.

A lot of 3d games are written so that the amount of movement required calculated based on the amount of time it's taken since the last time the positions were updated. The advantage of writing the code like that is that if the number of models on screen changes, then the speed you move at will be the same.

If the game is reading the time from a source that is also overclocked then it won't realise that it's actually running quicker. If so then it should be possible to adjust this in the code so that the game plays at the same speed as it should.

 

Yeah I'm aware of that, however that's not what's going on here. The game is simply running at a higher clock rate as I understand it updating everything that's happening on screen quicker (for a less technical example), not speeding up just the rendering making it smoother and keeping the game at it's original speed.

Like you said you'd ether have to recompile the game from source with changes made to how it renders the game (or implement a major hack to the rom if you know what you're doing).

 

On a PC, framerate over about 60 frames a second don't improve the smoothness of a game running, so a game running at say 200 FPS will look no different to one at say 60 FPS; a game running under 60 FPS will be jerky or work slower in places than it should. It's a bit like a funnel, you might have more pushing into it but the result is the same on the output; however when the processing of the game hits parts that need more processing, a meatier system can do that in its stride and therefore keep framerate smooth and lovely, no jerks in gameplay.

Using that logic to retro consoles, you can increase the clock speed and maybe the chip to make it handle harder parts of the processing to keep the game running smoothly, with the result that there will be fewer slowdowns when for example there are lots of sprites on the screen at a time, as there is more processing uumph going on, however that doesn't make the game work faster, just smoother. For a game to work faster it would need to frameskip, eg if it were processing 25 frames a second normally it might do 20 or 15 or whatever, which would make the game show faster but in reality be the same amount of actual processed frames a second; however of course you'd have less detail as more framerate=smoother action.

That's my logic anyway.

So, if a system is overclocked, it should just have the result of smooth gameplay throughout the game, not have it working faster as a game; that's frameskipping (ie cheating frames out).

So, if his mods make a busy game run smoothly, and smoother than the original console does as standard, and no frameskip, that is a worthwhile mod; if however it skips frames to make it look faster, then it doesn't have the benefit.

I think showing games that are processor intensive would be good, I hear Vortex on the SNES was a game with speed issues on the original hardware??

 

No extra frames are being rendered (unlike your pc example) - its just pushing the ones it has through faster. A PC game would still be the same speed, just more frames = smoother. This isnt the same speed, the entire game is running faster than its supposed to.

Its no smoother, its just sped up.

Say a 1 minute scene in a game has 100 frames (this is a made up number)

Instead of now rendering 200 frames and making it smoother, its just running those same 100 frames though in 30 seconds.

While this technical increases your FPS, hes now playing games in hyper speed mode.

 

Well luckily the control response is equally as sped up so it's still completely playable. Also you can't get more processor intensive than stunt race fx:



I don't know which it is but honestly the game is way more fun this way. I already have it running at 51.8 mhz without any issues. I'm waiting for faster oscillators to show up to see just how much further I can push stunt race fx.

Whatever my mod does I know this, the choppyness is gone and so is the control response delay, to me that alone is completely worth it. No playability is lost.

 

Bad_Ad84 speaks the truth.

That being said, I wouldn't mind a little increase in game speed (even if it doesn't actually equate to any more than perceived smoothness) from standard, but I'm not sure if the previous known overclocking efforts would satisfy my request, having never played in that fashion.

 

Yeah I agree - its not such a bad thing, some of those games were painfully slow and would have been much better running faster anyway. But the slowdown is still there - just the same, just that its equally sped up.

 

Well it looks more smoother and faster and should be more playable too, I haven't played these games myself though, even if the clock and everything is sped up. Sure not the same as the actual game engine running at higher fps, but it certainly renders those frames faster/at a smaller time interval.

I mean people can readily tell the difference between a system rendering 10, 20, 40, or 100 frames each sec, if it's in the lower end of the spectrum it usually looks choppy, and can make the game less pleasant to play.

So I think it's a good effort to speed these SuperFX games up, from the tinkering/experimentation perspective if nothing else.

 

I've been playtesting a lot. Tiido was nice enough to explain to me how to make a voltage divider so I managed to get a tiny surface mount 3.3v oscillator running. Played stunt race fx at 51.8 mhz and it runs fine, played for hours the gsu 2 barely gets warm. Also a huge thanks to an old post by motzilla where he mentions the double speed opcode which helped me know what to look up to disable it. Once you disable the double speed opcode the games suffer from more slowdown, but you're unable to overclock very fast in double speed mode so you can't get a great fps with double speed mode enabled, double speed mode seems to do nothing for framerate, it just helps with slowdown. However once you overclock the gsu any slowdown that you gained by disabling double speed is once again gone plus you get the additional framerate. This explains why for the longest time I could only get an amazing framerate out of the first starfox since it's the only game programmed for the mario chip which doesn't have double speed mode.

Also it's fine with me if this sort of thing isn't for everybody. I personally can't stand choppyness or delayed control response which is why I love doing this stuff.

 

It's not that this isn't for everyone ( I think just about everyone on this board love this kind of thing) and im honestly not trying to insult you but it seems like you can follow instructions and get thing's working but other then that you just don't seem to know what your talking about.

 

not if you get a 120hz monitor, then it's a lot smoother, but not 200hz yet.

 

Don't want to be mean but you got your facts wrong, the mario chip was only in the early star fox carts.

 

Yeah, in high speed/double speed mode certain things I've read still perform at the half speed clock rate. So always running in the half speed but having that half speed at well over double the normal source clock could help. Stunt Race FX certainly can feel slow so a boost in gameplay speed is nice. But for games such as the original Star Fox, I'd like to see someone take the time to make it render more frames and then combine that will an overclock to maintain the same relative speed but with a much improved framerate.

 

A lot of people seem interested in that. I'm fine with it being sped up personally. I suppose you could change the game programming for everything to move at half the speed. I'm trying this with doom as well, waiting on parts it's different wiring in doom it's a 16mbit rom. One thing I find strange is starfox 1 / 2 when they go too fast for the snes to keep up they still run the drawing just looks funny, however vortex once you go over 48 mhz it just freezes. I wonder why that is.