"Turbo" button makes a return with DS Lite on steroids
by Blake Snow 
{ Jul 18th 2006 at 12:00PM }
This is what happens when a Japanese hardware ninja successfully overclocks a DS Lite by 1.7 times. The man even threw in a switch to toggle between "turbo" and "normal" speeds. Tag this one under: "we don't even know why."
See also:
- Overclocking the DS (DS Fanboy)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sagan @ Jul 18th 2006 12:09PM
So if the DS hardware is capable of higher speed, why did Nintendo choose to reduce the clockspeed?
It might have come close to the power of the PSP graphics-wise...
Jonn @ Jul 18th 2006 12:14PM
"Kitt! Turboboosters!"
Ethan @ Jul 18th 2006 12:16PM
So, is super mario DS the exact same as super mario 64?
J @ Jul 18th 2006 12:19PM
That could make Wario Ware quite interesting.
kleger @ Jul 18th 2006 12:21PM
i want a ds lite wriststrap for mine! where'd he get that? japan only?
bv @ Jul 18th 2006 12:21PM
Here's how he did it. Seems pretty damn complicated for all that:
http://nds.jpn.org/ndslite2n.htm
Petrie @ Jul 18th 2006 12:21PM
I suppose if you're a gamer in a huge rush to finish your games this could come in very handy, but it just seems pointless. Maybe I'm missing some great use for this feature.
Petrie @ Jul 18th 2006 12:23PM
Does this seem totally pointless to anyone other than me? I suppose if you're in a huge rush to finish your games this could speed up the process for you, but otherwise this just seems like a "because I can" kind of thing.
Rikard @ Jul 18th 2006 12:29PM
Why would the pitch of marios voice go up if the machine was overclocked?
Matthew S @ Jul 18th 2006 12:36PM
Maybe he could put one together for the PSP.. y'know.. one where the game-load time doesn't exceed the fun-playing time..
Tesla @ Jul 18th 2006 12:38PM
File this under "extremely skeptical video" or "DSlite soon later melted from overheating", take your pick.
Jon C @ Jul 18th 2006 12:49PM
ARM processors can be overclocked well without suffering from overheating. The problem isn't heat but battery life and stability. My HTC Wizard has a 195Mhz ARM (OMAP) and I constantly overclock it to 240Mhz.
Tesla @ Jul 18th 2006 12:50PM
After finally getting the full video to load I will now categorize this as FUD.
Andrew @ Jul 18th 2006 12:52PM
looks kind of twitchy when he turns the speed up. this would be good for rpg's so you don't have to sit through all that text on the boring parts.
crono141 @ Jul 18th 2006 12:52PM
Very good reason why Nintendo would limit the clock speeds when it is capable of more. Its the same reason the PSP chip runs at 222 mhz standard instead of 333 mhz, battery life.
It takes more power to clock up the chip, especially by such a significant amount.
vidGuy @ Jul 18th 2006 12:52PM
Ethan, according to the Mario DS box, it's Mario 64 with more playable characters (Wario, Yoshi, Luigi), and new stars. Some mini games are thrown in there, too.
I don't owe a DS, though, so I can't tell you what's different first-hand.
unreal mccoy @ Jul 18th 2006 12:54PM
I think the entire video looks twitchy when he speeds it up, including his finger and thumb movements. I call fake.
Rootbeer @ Jul 18th 2006 12:55PM
Occam's Razor suggests that it would be a lot easier to make a video clip of a DS play back at 1.7x normal speed than it would be to make a real DS hot-switchable between 33 and 56MHz.
This is just as fake as the last "overclocked DS" video. At least this one didn't have a big huckin' external LED display "showing" the current clock speed.
ZaBlanc @ Jul 18th 2006 1:27PM
How would an overclocked chip translate into faster load times of those levels? :-)
Clearly fake.
Retro @ Jul 18th 2006 1:29PM
Hmm, what would happen if you played Mario Kart online? :]
Thomas Crymes @ Jul 18th 2006 1:31PM
Battery Life is probably key here.
And running at that speed may reduce the lifespan of the unit.
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly."
AndrewNeo @ Jul 18th 2006 2:07PM
Overclocking the processor would not cause this, the only way the game would 'speed up' like that is if he increased the speed of the system timer.. which I don't think you can do with just a switch. :P Like said above, it's much easier to make a video sped up 1.7x.
Dylan @ Jul 18th 2006 2:45PM
I would so want that. Not only could it add challenge to games Ive mastered, but I could finally play AC:WW at regular speed! (play the original AC after playing WW for a while, and youll know what I mean.)
Lee @ Jul 18th 2006 3:19PM
Fake or not, I'd definitely be interested in one of these.
I can't believe so many people seem to be confused at the usefulness of a speed-up button! Maybe they don't like RPGs, I dunno.
Scarabus @ Jul 18th 2006 3:26PM
I'm curious to know if this is an actual overclock, as in more raw performance, or just something that makes the internal clock tick faster. From watching this video I'm leaning towards the latter. If that's true however it's extremely pointless.
blh @ Jul 18th 2006 3:26PM
I agree with #20. Overclocking a DS would not make the game faster. It might improve the smoothness of it. Does having a 3Ghz computer vs a 1Ghz computer make you run faster in DOOM3? No, it just makes it smoother.
The ZeroCorpse @ Jul 18th 2006 3:37PM
Who cares about the overclocking?!?! I second the call for that wrist strap!!! Nintendo cheaped out and didn't include one with the Lite, and there's no official version out in America that I can find... I'd especially like one with the thumb stylus/pad.
HaloBreaker @ Jul 18th 2006 3:49PM
Play some abandonware games on XP (without DosBox) and tell me they don't run ultra fast.
mr.karmalicious @ Jul 18th 2006 3:50PM
Actually, this is real. Games made for the PC and such are scalable, to accomodate different clockspeeds, so they run the same at different clockspeeds. On the DS, however, all games are set to run at the exact clockspeed of the DS: speeding it up any (or slowing it down any) will result in a different playback speed of the game.
Mike @ Jul 18th 2006 3:51PM
Ah, but a 3Ghz processer would make DOS Wolfenstein 3D run faster(moving, shooting, etc.) than on a 1 Ghz processer due to the lack of a system timer. They based things around clock speeds then. I'm not sure about the sound. If you play W3D now the chaingun runs out of ammo virtually instantly
Eric @ Jul 18th 2006 3:52PM
#24:
That's true on a computer, but on a console games are developed with a set speed in mind. If it's assumed that the processor/bus will run at a certain speed corners can be cut during development. This used to happen on old computer games (Kings Quest era).
Mike @ Jul 18th 2006 3:54PM
Wow, three nearly-the-same posts.
dhaos @ Jul 18th 2006 4:01PM
I just want to know if his DS lite is cracked too
you can get the original DS strap for like $3 at nintendo.com
mr.karmalicious @ Jul 18th 2006 4:05PM
And a minute away from each other each time, jah. Yay.
KYXX @ Jul 18th 2006 4:15PM
You're thinking about this in the wrong way. It is nothing like overclocking modern desktop CPU's.
Are none of you old enough to remember old DOS games on early x86 computers?
Play one of those games on a more recent computer and the games are too fast to be playable.
DS games will be developed purely to be run at 33Mhz, so a faster system will play them faster.
blh @ Jul 18th 2006 4:42PM
I am sticking to my comment. If they programmed it so that every frame took the same amount of time to calculate, this video could be legit. But in modern games, they are programmed to interpolate their animation so that if a lot of stuff is happening on screen, it causes the framerate to skip, not the actual game to slow down. Or when not a lot of things are happening, it can render more frames. Old dos games do not take into account the amount of time since the last frame was rendered. That is why they are so fast now (no interpolation).
The Jeremy @ Jul 18th 2006 5:47PM
Brings back memories of the "Zoom" button that was installed on arcade games like Pac-Man ages ago. I really wish the later adapations of those games would include a "Zoom" option.
bill pullman @ Jul 18th 2006 6:15PM
to anyone that's calling BS on the sound: whether or not this is real, i used to make game genie codes on the Sega Genesis years ago that sped up the game, and the sound speeds up right along with it; pitch and all. it must have something to do with the sampling rate. all i know is, it's a definite possible side-effect.
Johan Krüger-Haglert @ Jul 18th 2006 7:01PM
Furre did this a long time ago:
http://www.chipper.se/forums/index.php?showtopic=4565
Johan Krüger-Haglert @ Jul 18th 2006 7:15PM
1: Power consumtion?
8: Because everything is overclocked by 1.7, the sound to.
10: If I remember things correctly the chips didn't got that hot at all.
12: But you are wrong, it's possible and it has been done before.
14: The voltage isn't raised to earlier I've read the power consumtion didn't go up that much.
17: I don't think any of them is fake, also since he even made a guide with images of all the stuff... why would he do that if it was a fake?
18: Because everything is faster? Are you all morons?
20: They have replaced the ocilator which times everything, so yes.
24: That is because the game on the PC is timed against something (video updates?) to not run to fast, maybe the DS is to, but if you overclock everything, even the internal clock, what is there to measure against?
LaughingTarget @ Jul 18th 2006 10:58PM
Overclocking DOES speed up games. Particularly those that were not designed for the clock speeds being utilized.
Long time PC gamers have to deal with this all the time when going back to old games. Curse of Monkey Island crashes on my 2.4 GHz AMD64 machine because it tries to play back cutscenes at hyper-speeds. Wing Commander Prophecy runs like Mr. T's GMC van the entire time. You fly around at warp speeds the whole way though.
Software can only be programmed to a certain degree of functionality within a range of clock speeds. Get too low, the game stutters and runs poorly. Get too fast, the game runs too fast and, in many cases, overwhelms the software and crashes.
Because console games are designed for one clock speed and one clock speed only, they are highly susceptible to the speeding effect. Interloping graphics takes extra time, time not necessary to take on a standardized machine like a console. Why waste the effort to develop a trick that is used only when dealing with non-standard hardware?
PC developers have to do this because they are developing on a range of hardware and speeds, and even then, cannot leave the upper end completely open and have to add in a cap at some point or another.
JB @ Jul 19th 2006 5:34PM
The most important thing is that this is NOTHING LIKE overclocking a modern PC, with it's highly variable hardware that MUST have controls to adjust front-side bus frequencies and CPU multipliers, and often provides methods to allow the user to over-ride the defaults set by the CPU.
The DS, like most consoles, is a monolithic unit with no controls AT ALL for varying frontside bus or adjusting CPU multipliers.
There's a few ways to overclock a console.
One is to swap the CPU out for a new one with a larger multiplier. A Genesis with a headphone jack can be overclocked in this manner, as it uses a standard 68000 that hasn't been modified or integrated into anything. This generally results in very clean overclocks, since only the CPU is affected, though it can still break things.
Most console games time themselves on the screen refresh, which is unaltered. If they finish a frame early, they stop and wait for the frame to go up before they continue.
Later Gennys integrated the 68k into a superchip with many other components. The DS is also constructed in such a manner, so CPU swaps are out of the question.
Another is to intercept the clock signal going into the CPU and substitute it with another clock signal. This has similar results to method 1.
But if the clock going into the CPU is shared by other components on the chip, it affects those components too.
I don't know if this can be done on a DS.
The third method, and by far the easiest, is to just substitute a new system clock for the current one.
THAT would cause an effect similar to what's seen here.
It doesn't usually work on consoles because the video timing is changed, so it ceases to output standard TV signals. But on a portable system, you can get away with it as long as you don't push anything outside of it's functional range.
I'm not saying this isn't a fake, but I see no reason it can't be real.
SausageBoy @ Jul 20th 2006 4:57PM
Of course it's real! It's actually a very simple hack.
For the people who commented about sound:
You clearly don't know anything about sound, soundwaves and how you store and play them back. I'll be nice and give you a crash course.
Sound travels in waves. The height of the wave is how loud it is, and the distance between the waves how high frequency it is. You store sound by taking the height of the wave every once in a while, and play it back by sending it to the speaker. Now, if the DS is overclocked, what will happen?
Sound will be sent to the speaker more often that it was intended to be. This obviously results in shorter wavelenghts, and higher pitch. Simple, really.