seanstar
Crazy idea- up front, this is crazy and there's no super-pressing need for it, but I still thought I'd float it- how hard would it be to add an overclocking option to Nestopia? By which, let me clarify
- keep throwing vblank signals at the usual 60Hz (or whatever the correct NTSC or PAL rates are), but
- allow the 2A03 (and any necessary intimately connected chips) to run at increased clock rate, up to "as fast as your machine can support"
I can see two possibly compelling use cases for this sort of feature:
- Homebrewing: Nestopia is my current gold standard to test on, but it would be great to have an easier way to determine whether, when a game chugs, I have some fault logic in my NMI counter and consequently any NMI-timed content, or whether I'm simply throwing too many/heavy instructions to fit in a single frame.
- Replay: Even commercial games chug at times, just like even commercial games put too many sprites on a scanline and expect it to work (I assume this is what the "unlimited sprites" option accounts for, since I don't see how one would even attempt to manipulate more than the fixed number of hardware sprites on the PPU :blink: ). It could be cool to see how games would have played if they didn't bottleneck (acknowledging that increasing the clock rate may break games which rely upon instruction-sequence timing...).
My immediate use case would be for Nestopia, but depending on the underlying architecture, the concept might be applicable to certain other systems- I've already done some exploration in hardware-overclocking and vblank-rate twiddling on Genesis platforms, for example.
Yeah, this is largely a question for Richard, but I'm mildly curious what popular feedback would be to the idea. After all, if I'm the only person in the world who would play with it, that's even less incentive to bother actually implementing it :S