Most hardware breaks down and gets worse as it ages. Some old Super Nintendo systems, however, are actually running faster. The changes aren’t noticeable to your average player, but dedicated fans have been measuring the differences and trying to uncover why the changes are occurring and what it could mean for the speedrunning of classics like Super Mario Kart and Super Metroid on original hardware.
The unusual mystery has to do with the 16-bit system’s 24.576 MHz APU [Audio Processing Unit] clock which relies on a ceramic resonator. The older it gets, the faster it seems to run. A small group of players is now testing old SNESes at different temperatures (one person even put theirs in the freezer) to crowdsource data that might help shed light on what exactly is going on.
As retro specialist Alan “dwangoAC” Cecil recently reported, Nintendo’s documentation states the DSP sample rate should be 32,000 Hz. But evidence from 2007 appeared to show a rate of 32,040 Hz on existing hardware, and by 2025 the average across several old consoles is closer to 32,076 Hz, with the fastest ones running at 32,182 Hz. What does this actually mean for the SNES itself? Well, the CPU clock which relies on a quartz crystal appears unchanged, but the faster APU means music could be slightly sped up and the general audio might be at a higher pitch.
In terms of the overall speed of the games, however, the only meaningful consequence would come between loading screens. As 404 Media explains, room-to-room transitions in a game like Super Metroid could occur slightly faster if the audio data is being loaded by the APU faster. Would this actually let players meaningfully finish games faster, especially when it comes to speedrunning records? Cecil told 404 Media he doesn’t think so. The time savings over an entire playthrough still probably wouldn’t amount to even an entire frame.
If the APU rates keep going up, however, it could eventually amount to a more tangible difference, especially for tool-assisted speedrun bots that fans use to decipher optimal routes for beating old games and to see what’s possible within games when the limitations of a human player are removed. And who knows, in 50 years maybe the ceramic resonator will start doing other weird things, assuming old SNES consoles still work at that point.
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