Starfox SNES Overclock

"Hey Bob, how many Passenger Pigeons are out here?"
"Well Jim, there must be several million."
"Any chance we will kill them all?"
"Absolutely no way, Jim."

 

I don't recognise where that quote's from.

My point still stands, you're not going to run out of SFX chips and you're not going to be able to prove me wrong either.

 

If N amount of SFX chips exist, now N-1 SFX chips exist. Then N-2, N-3, N-4.... Factor in how many have been destroyed by other means, how many more people will continue this, etc and you will run really low to the point where a Star Fox cart will cost $80+.

Don't agree? Too bad, you're denying reality for what it is like those idiots a few forums over that think copyright infringement is theft. Or do you know of a factory churning SFX chips out thus ensuring a constant supply for the near future? I'm not going to bother wasting my time with this thread if the best argument in return fire is "I'm right (with no proof), you're wrong (because I'm so right and you smell) so nuuhh".

I think I'll go start gutting Hi-Saturn Navis because, hey, we will never run out of them right?

 

There's over 1,500,000 Starfox carts in existance, do you really think there's ever going to be enough people buying carts and modifying them to make them scarce enough to appreciate the value to $80?

Even if 10 carts per day were bought and mangled then it'd take 270 years before the supply was down to it's last 500,000

 

Starfox Sales Figures:
Lifetime Totals: 1,629,837 799,920 559,944 2,989,701

 

source:
http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/6450/star-fox/

 

There are more reasons something disappears from this world beyond cart modding. Why am I having to explain the obvious here?

Where did that number come from? How did they count up the actual number of existing Star Fox carts? When did they last do the census? Did they ever do the census?

EDIT: ROFL, you're using the original sales figures? Why don't we use US census data from 1990 and hope it is still accurate.

 

What's funny about using original sales figures, they are a good indication of what the peak number of cartridges in existance was.

Even if you say that 50% of the carts have disappeared/aren't functional then the combined figure for pal and us carts still totals at 1.1 million globally.

I don't know why you're so confident that this extremely popular and well selling game has the capacity to become rare from a small group of hobbyists buying up what will never realistically amount to more than a few thousand carts.

 

Because that attitude is what has caused the destruction of so many things in this world that seemed to number so great as to be inexhaustible.

 

I used to think like you willcrook. Oh there are so many cartridges, millions of them. People cutting them for making bootlegs and experiments isn't that big of a deal.

But over the course of recent years I've realized just how bad this has become. For one thing your saying there are 4 million copies of Yoshi's Island. Are you good with numbers? 4 million is not actually a very big number. Just take the United States and you have over 300 million people. So a very smaller percentage can even own one of those carts. Next you need to remember how many of those carts are in other regions now. It's not uncommon for people elsewhere in the world to end up with these carts.

The fact is the pool of available cartridges is never going up. It will steadily be going down. These hacks of cartridges have significantly increased the depletion of available carts. I would say that the release of the Star Fox 2 ROM has taken the game Doom, which was worth very little years ago as I paid no more than 5$ for it, and drastically increased its rarity and value thanks to it being marked as a prime "donor" for Star Fox 2.

By the way, don't use the word justified. It's meaningless to my point. My point is this depletes supply and my point is true. Trying to "justify" is trying to ignore that my point is true. I think you don't realize the potential scale and scope of people trashing cartridges for making bootlegs or people that literally are just throwing them away as they think it's so old it is trash.

 

Not many people are interested, as a proportion, in old retro systems; is it therefore more of a "crime" to have a game opened up to make it something better or left in a loft for years collecting dust, being forgotten and broken when a heavy box is put on top of it?

There isn't much market for StarFox 2 on original hardware because not many people prefer to play original hardware of retro consoles, as they don't know the benefits of original verses emulation. Consequently, many games get thrown onto the tip, many stored and forgotten, and only the enthusiast or keen gamer still using; it is therefore a positive benefit to mod old game carts from people who don't want their copies any more, to make them into something relevant, better and will be used. On that logic, there is no problem with hacking old game carts. You can also argue perfectly legitimately that StarFox 2 was never released, so by making such game carts helps to PRESERVE the SNES and resurrect interest by this unreleased title...

On my main project, i'm destroying N64 game carts for the trace board; however only using crap game titles, nothing worth preserving or would be missed by any gamer, like the sports titles, etc; they can :gravedigging:

As to clockspeeds, it isn't relevant; if the game actually plays quicker or less jerky that it did before a mod, then that's what matters in StarFox 2; smoother/quicker/better.

 

I guess since I don't believe any of the Super FX games being destroyed are total crap I don't agree.

He's talking about Star Fox 1, not 2. In this case I mentioned his overclock mod was totally unnecessary and only solving part of the problem. You can "overclock" Star Fox 1 simply by setting the Super FX to high speed mode going from 10.5mhz to 21mhz. But you still need to modify the game to not run faster but to instead run at a higher smoother framerate.

Again we aren't talking about Star Fox 2 here. This is just about overclocking Star Fox 1. The main concern in my opinion is people trashing cartridges cause they don't know what they are doing, or they are doing it for what I think is a dumb reason, overclocking a game so it won't even run correctly. It would be different if people were building Star Fox carts with an updated program rom that took full advantage of the 21mhz mode. Also there is always the concern of people selling these for a profit which is pure and simple bootlegging.

 

I think one of my biggest beefs is that (I'm talking largely from personal experience here) learning to do such a mod on Star Fox is...stupid.

Hear me out. To swap SMD/SMT components isn't difficult with the proper equipment and experience. To gain that experience on Star Fox is the stupid part. Get it destroying an old TV that doesn't have a functional red gun or on some radios or whatever. Get actual rework equipment and not chip quik (I HATE this stuff now, essentially ruined a solder iron tip for everything but chip quik).

Wanna swap the chips? Go nuts, but don't learn how to do it through the destruction of several Star Fox carts and don't expect for the entire world to come gushing at a haphazard "solution" to a problem requiring more work than just an overclock.

I can't begin to count how many stupid mistakes I've made on hardware just learning to solder to my current level. Some were on devices I'd rather not have made that mistake on, most weren't. This is definitely a case of encouraging people to get into modding (not bad on it's own) by suggesting it might be OK to learn by doing your first BIOS replacement on a Hi-Saturn Navi when your soldering experience is limited to plumbing.

I don't mean to come off like an asshole and I could have worded things better, but I feel my points still stand.

 

Believe me my attitude towards things like natural resources and endangered animals, fishing etc is completely different than my attitude to Starfox for the Snes, which is a mass manufactured computer game which is in no danger of being reduced to low numbers.

4 million isn't a big number? it's a huge number in relativity to what we're talking about which is the only thing that matters.

Just from 1.5 million (taking into account that half of carts have been destroyed):

"Even if 10 carts per day were bought and mangled then it'd take 270 years before the supply was down to it's last 500,000"

I'm sure you are right and a lot less carts than half of those originally sold even exist but it's going to take a massive percentage of them to have vanished and a giant demand for these modified cartridge to make these babies rare and costly, imo.

How many people even play Starfox in cart form on the snes these days?

Or am I missing the point here completely and there's a possibility for a huge demand for this ?

 

My point is supply is limited and the only direction it goes is down. Oddly Nintendo stopped manufacturing the game more than a decade ago. Apparently they have no plans to make anymore cartridges either.

My point is that you may say there are X amount of them and it'll take a long time to go through it so don't worry about it. But as history will show you that day where it runs out or runs so low that the price is out of the reach of average people will come. In short, you shouldn't be wasteful.

The other point was this overclock mod was dumb and pointless. You can get the same effect by putting Star Fox on a GSU-1 or GSU-2 cartridge and enabling High Speed mode.

 

You're making an over generalization in there, you simply can't compare the agricultural errors of humanity in the past to estimating demand for a unworthwhile starfox cart mod which is as easy to quantify safely, you've even said it yourself - it's a pointless mod, so it's unlikely to cause shortages because realistically not enough people are going to bother.

Supply does stay the same but with the numbers that exist then it really doesn't matter if it's being reduced. If hundreds a year were lost to this then it's completely negligible because hundreds of thousands of copies exist and it'd take well over a hundred years to run out.

 

The Star Fox mod is not what I'm worried about on it's own. It's the thought of encouraging an increase in pointless modding or even bootlegging. The amount of people making bootleg carts was not very big a few years back. But now alot more people are aware of "reproductions" and the volume of them has increased many times over.

It's not that I'm concerned there is immediate danger. It's just a sign of a potentially bad trend. Like I said already if someone really fixed Star Fox to runs at a better framerate with the higher clock speed that would be very cool and worth modifying carts. But this mod is not worth it.

 

It doesn't matter if the carts will run out tomorrow, next week, 15 years or 1,000 years from now. There is absolutely no need to be wasteful if it can be avoided, ever; for anything that has ever existed or will exist.

Once you have that mantra down you can understand where we are coming from. As MottZilla pointed out "reproduction" cartridges are becoming big business. Personally I have a few NES carts set aside for such things like a Tecmo Bowl cart I'll hack (with a switch) to run the original rom and an updated roster version. I also have no problem seeing Sesame Street games get hacked for something more interesting.

However a line is crossed when people start to kill Star Ocean carts to pop in an EPROM with the translation inside. How many Star Fox carts will meet untimely deaths that otherwise wouldn't have because of such mods? Practice elsewhere.

 

Several Star Fox 2 source archives are hidden somewhere.

 

I'm going to have to give willcrook a pat on the back here. In our life time the SFX chip will not vanish. There are far too many out there even if half of them no longer exist. I seriously doubt that 10 carts EVERYDAY will be bought and destroyed for modding and even if they were, who gives a shit. In 270 years when they finally run out (there won't even be a SNES by then in homes) we'll all be long gone.

I'm all for preservation but in this case I think we don't have to worry or at least not yet.

Yakumo