Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you’ve probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early ‘90s.
The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles’ performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even ‘upgrade’, over time.
The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that’s programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could. If you’re a fan of the Games Done Quick events you might have seen Cecil and TASBot speedrun games there before, and if you want to get caught up on how and why Cecil does this you should read this Art Technica profile from 2016.
“SNES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age,” Cecil said on Bluesky on February 26, and shared a link to an online form and instructions where people could share how fast their own SNESs were running in order to collect more data and test if the theory is correct. Cecil told me that while he wants to collect more data before coming to any final conclusions, for now two things appear to be true: First, both from investigating existing information on SNESs that has been posted online over the years and from data people shared via the form, SNESs do appear to be running faster as they age. Second, the changes are very small, and after Cecil spoke to other people in the speedrunning and SNES emulation communities, it doesn’t appear that these changes are significant enough to impact speedrunning.
So what’s going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We’re getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second.
It’s well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart below, taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators’ oscillation under different physical conditions.
As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES’s release.
Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings.
The data also showed that SPC700s’ speed changes depending on temperature. To test this Cecil even put his SNES in the freezer overnight, then tested it, showing a difference.
In theory, if the SPC700 is running faster, it would deliver audio data to the CPU faster, and this could impact how a game runs. Let’s say you’re playing Super Metroid and you hit one of those many room-to-room transitions where you shoot to open a door, go through the door, and then the entire screen fades to black and pans over to the next room. Part of what is happening there is that the SNES is loading the data for that next room, including audio data. If the SPC700 is running faster, that data would load every so slightly faster, meaning overall the game would take less time to complete because you’re spending less time on those transitions.
After talking to speedrunners, however, Cecil believes even SNESs running on the faster end of the scale would not gain enough frames over the length of an entire speedrun to add up to even one whole second.
“We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun,” he told me. “We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU.”
While it’s unlikely these very small differences will matter to human speedrunners, they could matter a lot to TASBot’s tool-assisted speedruns, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or "deterministic," as Cecil explained. More importantly, Cecil is continuing to collect more data on SNESs as they’re aging and changing, which could teach us how to continue to use and emulate them in the future.
