How-to overclock your Nintendo DS

If you've gotten just a little too good at your Nintendo DS games and are looking for more of a challenge -- and also looking to void your warranty -- now there's a way to hack your console for making everything run almost twice as fast. A Japanese modder has just posted step-by-step directions (in Japanese, unfortunately) for re-wiring a DS Lite to perform at a claimed 1.7x speed, complete with a toggle switch in case you decide that turbo mode isn't appropriate for all occasions. It looks like you have to be pretty handy with a soldering iron to tackle this particular project, so if you've got the skillz and about four hours to waste on tinkering around with your DS's sensitive circuitry, then accelerated performance -- and funny-sounding audio -- will be your reward.

[Via Maxconsole]

[finishdish @ Jul 19th 2006 2:04PM]

Could this have an effect on render times under the upcoming Opera browser? Beats me.

[chenry @ Jul 19th 2006 2:25PM]

that seems kind of... pointless.... funny though.

[n00bmaster @ Jul 19th 2006 2:28PM]

he just swapped out the crystal.

thats pretty 1337 though.

[enigma7 @ Jul 19th 2006 2:46PM]

Hey maybe now Splinter Cell DS will be playable!

[misterduh @ Jul 19th 2006 2:58PM]

Lol, that would be sweet to play Splinter Cell at full speed.

[js @ Jul 19th 2006 3:05PM]

1.7x faster than normal.
1/2 the battery life.

[B @ Jul 19th 2006 3:23PM]

Aside from the great step by step pics which appear to add some credibility, did anyone else notice that in the video for the first two speed changes the switch was moved one step either from up to down or vice versa. In the last switch during the race the user moved the switch from up to down and then back up. Did I see this wrong? Although I'd never do this, considering what steps were illustrated using a soldering iron, this would be an incredibly unfunny fake.

[Joseph Rosario @ Jul 19th 2006 3:38PM]

There is now an english version of this hack available here:

http://ndshotmod.com/nds2na.htm

[thomas @ Jul 19th 2006 4:15PM]

it'd definately save time in the upcoming final fantasy..less time watching battle sequences..

[adam @ Jul 19th 2006 5:02PM]

I think this is sweet.. I'm wondering if I could crack open my girl's brick DS and do the same..

bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

[moosio66 @ Jul 19th 2006 5:51PM]

Wait a second...

When you overclock you CPU does it make your games run faster? No - it lets you handle games that are more graphics/physics intensive. The sound/gameplay isn't twice as fast.

This is a fake. The NDS has an onboard real time clock (separate chip, separate crystal) that should be governing system timing. Yes, by swapping a crystal you are overclocking your processor, but I highly doubt it would speed up the sound and gameplay. I think it would be much easier to make the video playback twice as fast.

[TIMMAH! @ Jul 19th 2006 6:29PM]

Yes but wouldn't this cause the unit to run unacceptably hot and cause the case to discolor? (Sorry couldn't work in the screen scratching too...)

[jazzay @ Jul 20th 2006 2:57AM]

Moosio66: On TI calculators, games ARE faster on faster processors, because it is written on a certain clock speed. It's expected that the processor will do a certain amount ot tasks per second, when all of a sudden its doing twice as many tasks, the game is going to move twice as fast.

Not so with PC games, theyre writtin to play with processsors of all kinds of speed and scaling. But with things expected to have constant clock speed, if the clock speed goes up, the game speed up.

[jazzay @ Jul 20th 2006 3:00AM]

oh, shoot, you know what, its late.

missed the part about the DS having a real time clock, so you may be right, but, I dunno, maybe the dropped it with the DS lite?

[emulator-wii @ Jul 20th 2006 11:08AM]

In future this could be used to run home-brew applications and emulators at faster speed like the same thing was done to get SNES emulator to run faster on GBA. I don't see any use for commercial games though.

[moosio66 @ Jul 20th 2006 12:50PM]

jazzay - a real time clock is required if the system is going to maintain a clock/calender. it isn't dropped on the DS lite. the real time clock will remained powered even when the system is off so it will maintain the correct time. you could do this with the CPU, but the RTC will consume much less power.

good point about the calculators. consoles/handhelds are a known piece of hardware, unlike PCs, so it's conceivable that you could do wait states based on processor cycles. but then again, nintendo handhelds are always backward compatible, so the games shouldn't be coded to use processor based wait states. seems like bad practice if true.

we know the DS has an RTC, why wouldn't it be used generate an accurate clock - i.e. interrupt the ARM on fixed intervals to update a counter? I'm just extremely skeptical - it seems much easier to fake the video.

[Esch @ Jul 20th 2006 9:51PM]

The problem with the DS using the RTC for game timing is that the resolution of the RTC is, as far as I know, far too low; it's simply for keeping ordinary time, not for high performance timing.

From the coding I've done for DS, you mostly depend on the vertical blank interrupt to keep time, which I'm assuming is scaled to 60fps by the speed of the processor. Thus, if you overclock the processor, you speed up the vblank interrupts, and thus speed up everything else, I think.

[max @ Aug 5th 2006 2:40PM]

haha, that english traslation is a classic case of engrish.

i like the final part "Extremery daricate handy work!"

[donnie @ Apr 1st 2008 8:41PM]

They are obviously using a simple quartz wafer crystal oscillator to create two separate voltages to represent 1 and 0. If they followed the usual then that would be 5 volts would be 1, 0 volts would be 0 and a threshold of about 2.5 volts. The crystal works by a voltage being applied this will cause they crystalline structure to be warped then snap back at a rate relative to size and voltage. This will case the voltage to go to a positive to a negative back to a positive voltage. They will shape the resulting it to a square wave, which looks like a square or rectangle. Then it will be rectified (cut off the negative portion of the wave). Now to step to into the world of computers, to get the frequency required for what we need we will put this signal into a frequency multiplier. When we over clock a computer the multipliers are the parts we modify which is why the voltages, amps, and so on are increased. Now for the crystal if we want to increase the frequency we decrease the voltage. There is a minimum voltage though.