If you grew up in the 1990s, there’s a good chance you played such hits as Super Mario World, Star Fox, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the beautiful Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES.
If you still have the console, you may want to pick it up and give it another play. Because users have noticed something a little strange over the last few weeks; the console appears to have sped up as it has aged.
Back in February, the team behind TASBot – a tool-assisted speedrun bot that sends control inputs to retro consoles – put out an intriguing message to appeal for more data.
“SNES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age,” the TASBot team wrote on BlueSky. “Help us collect data. Do you have an SNES and a flash cart? Run the smpspeed ROM test from lidnariq on your console.”
Other users shared screenshots showing the unusual speed increase.
On Thursday, the TASBot team came back with their findings, after 143 people tested their own consoles and sent in the data.
The test confirmed that SNES consoles are running ever so slightly faster than their 1990s specifications. The weird speed boost is in the console’s audio processing unit (APU), and could potentially result in higher-pitched noises emanating from whatever horrible cathode ray TV you choose to play Donkey Kong Country on. Other parts of the console appear to be unaffected.
“The main 21 MHz [central processing unit] clock uses a quartz crystal. It is fine,” the TASBot team wrote while the data was still coming in. “The 24.576 MHz APU clock uses a ceramic resonator. It is not. It seems to run faster years later. It also seems to speed up when warm.”
Ceramic resonators have several advantages over crystal resonators, including faster startup times.
“The oscillator frequency of the ceramic resonator can more easily be tuned to the desired frequency,” Microchip Technology explains. “But, it is also more sensitive to temperature and load changes, causing undesired frequency variations.”
The increased speed is unlikely to result in faster speed runs, unless hearing a slightly higher-pitched Mario theme really adds the extra sense of urgency you need to crush Goombas. Nevertheless, the team is continuing to investigate the issue.
“[TASBot team member dwangoAC] has many more conclusions to share,” the TASBot team added. “He froze a console and measured it. It increased 32 Hz. The 217 Hz range of samples was much larger. It means Hotplate% will not help as much. A ‘fast’ DSP rate is still unlikely to impact speedrun leaderboards however. More analysis is needed.”
