The engineers squeezed as much performance as they could from the 16-bit processors of yore and then turned the job of optimization over to coders. Such was the hunger for power they provided co-processors in the game cartridges themselves. It's astonishing, then, to find that Super Nintendo consoles are getting faster decades later all by themselves.
Ars Technica explores the mystery.
After significant research and testing on dozens of actual SNES units, the TASBot team now thinks that a cheap ceramic resonator used in the system's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is to blame for much of this inconsistency. While Nintendo's own documentation says the APU should run at a consistent rate of 24.576 Mhz (and the associated Digital Signal Processor sample rate at a flat 32,000 Hz), in practice, that rate can vary just a bit based on heat, system age, and minor physical variations that develop in different console units over time.
Casual players would only notice this problem in the form of an almost imperceptibly higher pitch for in-game music and sounds. But for TASBot, Allan "dwangoAC" Cecil says this unreliable clock has become a "constant, pervasive, unavoidable" problem for getting frame-accurate consistency in hardware-verified speedruns.
If you're thinking "Roll on Super Cyberpunk 1997!," the speed increase is barely perceptible. You'll still need to mod the hardware if you want real-time ray tracing on the SNES.
Previously:
• Company sells old Nintendo SNES consoles with clear cases
• Rumor: Nintendo planning SNES Mini
• Wireless SNES controller for modern machines
