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Technology & Innovation
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Time's Glitch: The Bizarre Reason Your SNES Is Faster Today Than in the 90s
Your old SNES is running faster than it did at release! A tiny, aging component in its sound chip is slightly overclocking the console, a change so subtle only speedrunning robots can detect it, leading to a fascinating detective story in the retro gaming community.
There's a certain magic to firing up a vintage game console. The hum of old electronics, the clunk of a cartridge slotting into place—it's a portal back in time. But what if that portal wasn't just taking you back, but was also subtly changing the past? In a bizarre twist of electronic aging, Super Nintendo consoles across the globe are running measurably faster today than they did on the day they were manufactured, and the discovery is all thanks to the most precise gamers on the planet.
A Ghost in the Machine
For years, the Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) community faced a frustrating problem. These players use emulators and software tools to create theoretically perfect, frame-by-frame speedruns that push games to their absolute limits. The issue was that a TAS created on an emulator, which was supposed to be a perfect digital replica of the SNES, would often fail or 'desync' when played back on original hardware. A jump that was possible on the emulator would be missed by a single frame on the console. For a community built on absolute precision, this was a maddening inconsistency.
The TAS Detective Story
For a long time, the blame was placed on emulator inaccuracies. But as emulators became more and more precise, the problem persisted. The mystery was finally unraveled by dedicated members of the TASVideos community, most notably a user named dwangoAC. Through meticulous testing, they discovered the discrepancy wasn't a flaw in the software, but a feature of the aging hardware.
It turns out the ceramic resonator that is used as the clock source for the S-SMP (the audio CPU) runs faster as it ages, and it's drifting out of spec... The result is that almost every SNES console in existence is running faster than specifications state, and thus faster than emulators.
The console wasn't the constant; it was the variable. Hardware expert and YouTuber Voultar later confirmed these findings by measuring the clock speeds of numerous SNES consoles, finding a consistent, albeit tiny, increase over the factory specification.
The Sound of Speed
The culprit is a small, unassuming component connected to the S-SMP, the SNES's audio chip: a ceramic resonator. This component acts like a crystal metronome, providing a steady clock pulse that dictates the speed at which the chip operates. However, unlike more stable quartz crystals, ceramic resonators are known to 'drift' in frequency as they age and are exposed to environmental changes. In the case of the SNES, this drift has been almost universally in one direction: faster.
An Imperceptible Boost with Major Consequences
To be clear, this speed increase is minuscule—often less than 0.2%. You, as a human player, will never notice it. Your muscle memory won't be thrown off, and your childhood memories of Super Metroid remain intact. But for a TAS, where a single frame (1/60th of a second) is the difference between success and failure, this tiny drift accumulates. Over the course of a 30-minute speedrun, that tiny fraction of a percent adds up, causing the game state on the real console to pull ahead of the emulator, breaking the entire run.
This discovery forced the TAS community to make a fascinating choice. Instead of sticking to the 'factory-new' specification, the standard for SNES emulation was adjusted to match the speed of an 'aged' console. Modern, accuracy-focused emulators now run slightly faster than Nintendo's original design documents intended, all to match the reality of the hardware that exists today. It’s a beautiful testament to the dedication of a community that uncovered a secret of aging electronics, a secret hidden in the sound of speed.