Gameboy Color Overclocking

By Brandon Bridges

Alright, so one day I was looking on the internet about subjects on overclocking. Overclocking is a big hit for many consoles, some going even as far as overclocking things such as a NES. I searched and searched, but with no luck could I find an article about how to overclock my Gameboy Color. I realized that this would be something I would have to do on my own.

The thing that helped me the most was Japanese sites. Except from the fact that I don't know any japanese, the pictures were extremely helpful, and when I saw overclocking could be done with a common electronics crystal-I was interested.

After digging though the electronics cabinet, I came out with a crystal with a value of around 6mhz. This crystal will not be used in the design because shortly after I relocated the crystal, one of the legs broke. A 10mhz crystal does the same job, anyways.

Speaking of crystals, the crystals I really used were crystals with rough values of 2, 10, 16, and 37mhz. Most of anything will work above 16, I THINK, I did not have a higher rated crystal, but the performance of the 37 was indifferent from that of the 16.

The 2mhz crystal was only used to see if the gameboy would handle underclocking, due to a belief that the internal BIOS of the gameboy did not permit ratings above or below a certain level. When I used the 2mhz crystal, the gameboy booted up extremely slow, and performance could not be compared to anything, except maybe a NES running a very large and complicated game. The results do not prove to be of an advantage when I played.

The 10mhz crystal was different. When I used it, the performance was increased to a level that would prove to still be enjoyable, not being too fast but not being slow like most games are. The 10mhz crystal is the one I decided to permanently use, it being the better choice. The button response and playing speeds were improved by around 1.5 times faster, making games like Donkey Kong and Pokemon much more enjoyable to play.

The 16mhz and 37mhz crystals, as stated, resulted in relatively the same performance. The speed was too fast to play many games efficiently, the system running too fast to actually make small movements. This should only be used on games that need alot of help, if used at all. Overheating and failure of components might also be a factor if usage times are more than around an hour.

Now that you have hopefully read the above, now is on to the fun part:Installation. Basic soldering skills, and an iron of around 30 watts are needed. Since 10mhz is the best choice, I will be installing it. You will also need 2 pieces of wire about 3 inches long a piece, with stripped ends, and some needle nose pliers to remove the old crystal.

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