Tired of the poor performance of your NES? Some games, particularly earlier releases, suffered from poor performance based on how many sprites were on the screen at a given moment. The fact was that in the early days of Nintendo gaming, the programmers hadn’t truly mastered how to make the most out of the NES’s hardware and processing power.

Now, through the power of needless geek experimentation, you can overclock your NES’s processor to improve performance on those few games that suffered.

The NES I tested proved to be amazingly resilient when overclocked. Even when run at 250% proper clock, the CPU and RAM remained stable, as evidenced by extreme rarity of crashes and the game engines running perfectly. The only corruption witnessed was audio pitch rising as clock did (due to sound hardware being integrated into the CPU) and graphical problems clearly evidenced by CPU/PPU timing problems. I say timing because the PPU is running on its own separate clock, the original ~21 source clock, so any problem could not partain [sic] to the PPU’s tolerance to overclocking (it never saw higher). VRAM did not appear to be suffering corruption either, as the random tile flashing transpired only on the topmost sprite layer (had there been VRAM corruption, all layers would be affected.)

Touching the surface of the CPU, the temperature was observed to be cool, so clearly below body temperature.

Make sure that the next time you’re playing Legend of Zelda and you walk into a room full of darknuts that your NES can handle the processor demand and respond with a smooth gameplay experience. Then you’ll truly be playing with power.

For instructions on how to overclock your NES see Epic Gaming’s Nintendo NES Overclocking Guide.

Chefelf is a contributing author at Lance & Eskimo, the proud administrator of Chefelf.com and a Head Moderator at Xbox-Scene. When he isn’t busy playing video games he is busy writing about them or thinking about them. He likes to think of this as “endearing” rather than “one dimensional”.