Some things in life are hard to understand. Why do socks vanish in the laundry? Why do cats stare at nothing for minutes on end? And why, three decades after its release, is the audio of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) mysteriously running faster than ever before?
Yes, faster.
It’s not because someone overclocked it. It’s not a hidden setting. Time itself seems to be giving it a speed boost. And while this strange phenomenon is mostly harmless, it’s causing headaches in one of gaming’s most obsessive communities: speedrunners.
Leave it to speedrunners to discover things
For millions of people, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) is a time capsule — a beloved gray box that played Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda, and Castlevania just as they remembered. But something odd is happening inside these aging consoles. They aren’t staying the same.
This story started with Alan Cecil, known online as “dwangoAC.” Cecil is a security consultant and administrator of TASBot—a robot designed for tool-assisted speedruns, where games are played with top precision with the goal of finishing as fast as possible.
In late February, Cecil first posted that NES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age. “Help us collect data,” he wrote on Bluesky, asking people to run a speed test and post the results.
This isn’t as absurd as it sounds. Some 15 years ago, programmers realized that the audio processing unit was misbehaving. It was running at a higher frequency than it was supposed to. The deviation was small, but it was enough to break some games in emulation.
A total of 143 consoles were tested after Cecil’s call. The results showed that the SNES was running faster than anyone had realized. The highest recorded frequency reached 32,182 Hz, a measurable increase over the decades.
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Why is this happening?
The reason behind this phenomenon lies in an easily overlooked piece of hardware: a ceramic resonator inside the APU.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) has two primary clock sources that control different aspects of its operation: a quartz crystal (for the CPU clock) and a ceramic resonator (for the APU clock).
Unlike the quartz crystal that controls the SNES’s main CPU clock, ceramic resonators are cheaper and less stable. They drift over time due to factors like heat exposure, electrical stress, and material degradation.
Documentation from Murata, a manufacturer of these components, suggests that ceramic resonators tend to increase in frequency as they age. And while the effect is usually tiny — unnoticeable in most electronics — when you compare dozens of SNES consoles over 30 years, the pattern becomes clear.
Cecil even tested his SNES in a freezer to confirm that temperature played a role. Sure enough, when he took the console out and measured its APU, it ran slightly slower until it warmed up again.
Does this matter?
For most practical purposes (ie regular people playing games), it doesn’t matter that much. It can actually be a minor inconvenience, throwing off your muscle memory or changing the pitch to classic tunes.
But for speedrunners, it’s complicated.
Every fraction of a second matters when trying to set a world record. Since the SNES loads audio data between levels, a faster APU means slightly shorter loading times. Over a multi-hour run, that could add up — though so far, tests suggest the difference is still within the margin of error.
There are also tool-assisted speedruns, and this is where things get trickier. TASBot relies on frame-perfect inputs, meaning even the smallest hardware inconsistency can throw an entire run out of sync. If SNES consoles continue to speed up over time, emulator settings may need to be adjusted to keep up with the hardware’s gradual drift.