Super Nintendo Consoles Found to Run Slightly Faster Over 35 Years

Aging SNES hardware shows minor speed increases due to changes in its ceramic resonator, sparking curiosity among retro gaming enthusiasts and speedrunners.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) has been observed to run slightly faster as it ages, with its audio processing unit (APU) showing increased DSP rates over time.
Originally designed to run at 32,000 Hz, recent measurements show some SNES consoles now operating at rates as high as 32,182 Hz, a phenomenon attributed to changes in the ceramic resonator's performance.
This speed increase has minimal impact on gameplay, with effects limited to faster audio processing and slightly quicker transitions, such as room-to-room loading in games like Super Metroid.
Speedrunning experts, including TASBot administrator Alan Cecil, have noted that the changes are unlikely to significantly affect human speedruns but may influence tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) precision in the future.
Researchers and retro gaming fans are crowdsourcing data to better understand the phenomenon, with experiments showing that environmental factors like temperature can temporarily alter console performance.