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I've always wondered what it would be like to overclock a Sega Genesis to fix the horrible framerate issues in Road Rash 2 and 3. With the power of emulation, I've succeeded.
Setup: The Wild Thing 2000 super bike from Road Rash 2 is notoriously hard to control. Insane speeds, twitchy handling, not to mention going 200+mph will make you wreck if you hit nearly anything. An extremely low framerate make things even worse.
I start the race playing with the emulator set to normal settings. After one wreck, I pause the game, overclock the genesis's cpu by a factor of 8, then resume.
Results: The framerate is no longer an issue. The engine seems to top out somewhere between 30 and 60 frames per second. However there are adverse side effects. It's interesting to note that the rendering aspect of the engine was held back by the limitations of the genesis cpu.
While the game runs smoothly, the game doesn't play the same. The bikes don't handle as quickly as they normally would, usually taking 3-4 times as long to turn. This is not a result of control lag either (most of the controls are actually more responsive since the results are drawn quicker) but instead the game physics get messed up. The Wild Thing suddenly becomes a much easier bike to control yet still feels sluggish when turning.
Unfortunately it's the way the game was programmed, so unless the engine is re-written to take advantage of a higher framerate while keeping the same feel there's no way to smooth the game out without completely breaking it. Road Rash 3 is even worse (to the point where the bike is almost glued to the road) and the biggest difference is the insane sharp turn in Germany (near the end of the track in Level 1) where you can take the turn at full speed and stay in the center of the road.
*Note*
Hopefully the video framerate isn't completely decimated by youtube so the difference in smoothness can be seen. If it does get messed up I'll upload the original video somewhere else. Also, the speedup in the music track is a result of the emulator itself, NOT the overclock (speedup is present even with standard genesis cpu speeds)