Over-clocking the Atari 8-bit with liquid nitrogen

[fibrewire]

I remember seeing an article circa ~1996 involving a Macintosh Color Classic and liquid nitrogen to over-clock the cpu to somewhere around 1GHz speed. As this is incredible, I wonder if this is even possible on the Atari 8-bit line. It would make for an "unorthodox" upgrade - an incredible speed boost while keeping the 8-bit as original as possible. Hopefully all chips involved in being cooled are of the CMOS type, as I don't believe this idea is feasible if they are NMOS chips.

 

Any ideas?

[Rybags]

Kinda pointless in some regards since everything in A8 and most old computers is running at a speed that's same or proportional to that required to drive the video.

 

Although of course if you were to go OCing you could simply clock the CPU at a multiple of the stock, run everything else at stock and have a circuit that produces wait states when needed.

 

That said, liquid Nitrogen is to combat heat which mightn't even be an issue if you simply wanted to double the speed. I'd guess the issue is more a case of the older fab processes having a finite ceiling that is probably more a physical limit than a thermal one.

 

All that aside the much easier route these days would be simply to put in an upgrade that gives 14 MHz by design... or maybe go for an AVR solution that replaces the 6502 with something that can emulate it's functions at a much higher speed.

[candle]

i was running my original atari 65xe with 27mhz master clock giving around 31khz horizontal

on standard monitor screen was doubled (two copies were next to each other) so i guess if i had VGA then then it would look normall

i didn't run it for long, just checked if that would be possible at all

[Bryan]

I think the fastest possible CPU would end up being one built in an FPGA which maintains a 1.7~ MHz interface to the rest of the computer.

[fibrewire]

i was running my original atari 65xe with 27mhz master clock giving around 31khz horizontal

on standard monitor screen was doubled (two copies were next to each other) so i guess if i had VGA then then it would look normall

i didn't run it for long, just checked if that would be possible at all

 

Or you figured out a way to double the display resolution of the Atari 800 - i wonder if this is similar to the Apple II double high resolution mode?

[Magic Knight]

One way of speeding up a PAL 800 without the nitro is to swop the crystal from a NTSC machine - great for 3D games (mercenary) ort any one relying on linear updates (that drag) but any music is sped up also,

 

Interesting to try different things with this approach.