Possible solution to unreadable text issue in N64 games?

[RickyEarl]

I was working on getting n64 games into a playable state. I had gotten Banjo Kazooie to be totally playable with very little lag or issue. However, despite the fact that it ran just fine, the in-game text was unreadable - scrambled and pixel-y if that makes sense. Tried a few other games and saw the same thing in them - (Banjo Tooie, Wave Race, Conker).

I looked around various boards and saw others had complained of the same problem, but no solutions had been found.

So I was trying various things - playing with memory, resolutions, etc. when I noticed the following. I originally had the following overclocking settings in my /boot/config.txt:

arm_freq=1350
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80
gpu_freq=500
gpu_mem=256
sdram_freq=500

I had been playing with turning those on and off in order to improve performance. At one point, the page break in putty occurred right after the gpu_freq setting. When I turned the settings back on, I accidentally skipped the two after the page break and so I had this:

arm_freq=1350
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80
gpu_freq=500
#gpu_mem=256
#sdram_freq=500

That resulted in the weird, scrambled, unreadable text. When I turned all of the above settings off, Banjo Kazooie slowed to a crawl, but the text was fine. With all those settings enabled, the game works fine and the text is fine. It was only when those last two were off and the others were on that the text got messed up.

I have no specific idea what that means other than something to do with SDRAM frequency and/or the GPU memory size in relation to the overclock will cause the text to scramble.

I hope someone smarter and more knowledgeable than me can use this somehow.