An nameless reader quotes a report from 404 Media: One thing very unusual is going on inside Tremendous Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a element you’ve got in all probability by no means heard of is operating ever so barely quicker as we get additional and additional away from the time the consoles first hit the market within the early ’90s. The invention began a light panic within the speedrunning neighborhood in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it might affect how briskly video games are operating and due to this fact how lengthy they take to finish. This might doubtlessly wreak havoc on many years of speedrunning leaderboards and make monitoring the quickest occasions within the speedrunning scene way more tough, however that end result now appears impossible. Nevertheless, the obscure discovery does spotlight the truth that previous consoles’ efficiency shouldn’t be frozen on the time of their launch date, and that they’re made from delicate parts that may age and degrade, and even ‘improve’, over time. The concept that SNESs are operating quicker in a manner that might affect speedrunning began with a Bluesky publish from Alan Cecil, identified on-line as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (brief for tool-assisted speedrun robotic), a robotic that is programmed to play video games quicker and higher than a human ever might.
[…] So what is going on on right here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) referred to as the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to recreation builders on the time the SNES was launched says that the SPC700 ought to have a digital sign processing (DSP) charge of 32,000hz, which is ready by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We’re getting fairly technical right here as you’ll be able to see, however principally the composition of this ceramic element and the way it resonates when related to an digital circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how a lot information it processes in a second. It is effectively documented that all these ceramic resonators are delicate and may run at increased frequencies when topic to warmth and different exterior situations. For instance, the chart [here], taken from an software guide for Murata ceramic resonators, exhibits adjustments within the resonators’ oscillation underneath totally different bodily situations.
As Cecil instructed me, as early as 2007 folks making SNES emulators seen that, regardless of documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 ought to run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran quicker. Emulators typically now emulate on the barely increased frequency of 32,040Hz as a way to emulate video games extra faithfully. Digging via discussion board posts within the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil began to place a sample collectively: the SPC700 ran quicker each time it was measured additional away from the SNES’s launch. Knowledge Cecil collected since his Bluesky publish, which now consists of greater than 140 responses, additionally exhibits that the SPC700 is operating quicker. There’s nonetheless plenty of variation, in concept relying on how a lot an SNES was used, however general the development is evident: SNESs are operating quicker as they age, and the quickest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. Extra analysis shared by one other consumer within the TASBot Discord has much more detailed technical evaluation which seems to help these findings. “We do not but know the way a lot of an affect it can have on an extended speedrun,” Cecil instructed 404 Media. “We solely understand it has a minimum of some affect on how shortly information may be transferred between the CPU and the APU.”
Cecil stated minor variations in SNES {hardware} could not have an effect on human speedrunners however might affect TASBot’s frame-precise runs, the place inputs have to be exact right down to the body, or “deterministic.”