Why 30-Year-Old SNES Consoles Are Getting Faster, Not Slower

Original SNES consoles, it turns out, are getting faster as they age. That claim started as a post on r/gaming, but it didn't come from someone squinting at a CRT and trusting their gut. It came from measurements — collected by the people who care most about exact timing: the tool-assisted speedrun crowd.

In late February 2025, Alan Cecil — better known online as dwangoAC, the security consultant who runs TASBot — put out a call on Bluesky. SNES consoles seemed to be running faster as they got older, he wrote. Help us collect data: if you have an SNES and a flash cart, run the smpspeed ROM test written by lidnariq. Of the people who did, 143 responses made it into the analysis.

The result is small, strange, and completely real.

Two Clocks Inside Every SNES

To understand what's drifting, you have to know that the SNES keeps time with two completely different oscillators.

The main clock comes from a quartz crystal. In an NTSC console it runs at 21.477 MHz and gets divided down to the 3.58 MHz the Ricoh 5A22 CPU actually works at. Quartz is the good stuff: stable, precise, and largely indifferent to the passage of decades.

The audio side is a different story. The SNES's sound hardware — the Sony-designed S-SMP and S-DSP — runs off a 24.576 MHz ceramic resonator. Divide that by 768 and you get 32,000 Hz: the nominal sample rate of the DSP, and the number that every piece of SNES music was composed against.

Nintendo didn't pick ceramic out of carelessness. Ceramic resonators are cheaper than crystals, start up faster, and take up less board space — all perfectly reasonable trade-offs for a chip that only has to make music sound approximately right. The compromise is documented by component manufacturers themselves: as Microchip puts it, the oscillator frequency of a ceramic resonator "can more easily be tuned to the desired frequency," but it is also "more sensitive to temperature and load changes, causing undesired frequency variations." That tolerance is loose at the factory and looser thirty years later.

What 143 Consoles Actually Told Us

The community data produced a fairly clean picture.

• Average DSP rate: 32,076 Hz, against a nominal 32,000 — about 76 Hz fast, or roughly 0.24%.
• Warm-up shift: about 8 Hz, averaged across machines going from cold to warmed up.
• Spread: 31,965 to 32,182 Hz, a 217 Hz range across warm consoles. Some units are actually still below spec.
• The CPU clock is fine. The quartz-based main clock shows no comparable drift.

Temperature turned out to matter, but not enough to explain everything. dwangoAC froze a console and measured it, reporting that warming it back up pushed the rate up by 32 Hz — so heat is a factor, and aging is a separate one. The team's own summary was refreshingly blunt: why it happens, and how it affects games, they did not yet know.

That "faster when warm" detail is the tell. It points straight at the ceramic resonator rather than anything digital.

Why Ceramic Resonators Drift Faster, Not Slower

Almost everything else about aging hardware goes the other way. Electrolytic capacitors dry out, plastics yellow, solder joints crack, backup batteries leak. The SNES audio clock is a rare case of a component getting quicker with time.

The mechanism is baked into the material. Ceramic resonators are piezoelectric parts whose frequency shifts as the ceramic ages; Murata, one of the largest makers of these components, documents frequency increasing with age in its own resonator literature. In normal consumer electronics the effect is so small it doesn't matter — a remote control or a microwave doesn't care about 0.2%. But an audio DSP clocked by that resonator cares a lot, because musicians wrote to a specific pitch and speedrunners count frames.

There's also a compounding factor: the SNES runs warm, and warm resonators run fast. Thirty-five years of heat cycles is a lot of cycles.

Does a Faster SNES Actually Change Anything?

For most players: no, not really. A 0.24% clock bump raises pitch by about four cents, which is well below what almost anyone can hear without a reference track side by side. Music is a touch brighter, timing is a touch brisker, and that's the whole experience.

For the speedrun community, it's more interesting than alarming:

• Loading. SNES games frequently stream audio data between levels, so a faster APU means marginally shorter loads. Over a multi-hour run those milliseconds still land inside the margin of error, and tests so far suggest leaderboards aren't moving because of it.
• Tool-assisted runs. This is where it genuinely bites. TASBot replays frame-perfect input, and a run built against one console's timing can desync on another. If the reference hardware itself is drifting, the reference is a moving target.
• Emulation. Emulators are calibrated against pristine, factory-fresh hardware. If real consoles have quietly moved off spec, then "cycle-accurate" is now chasing a target that no longer exists in the wild. That tension — authentic 1991 behavior versus what a 2026 console actually does — is why the community wants more data rather than a tidy answer.

It also raises an uncomfortable preservation question: the SNES you play today is not the SNES you played in 1995. Thirty-year-old hardware isn't a fixed reference, it's a slow experiment running in everyone's living room.

Play the Classics Without the Drift

If all of this makes you want to hear what the composers actually wrote, Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack is the obvious place to start — it's the music people cite most when this story comes up. Then there's Super Mario Kart, the game whose frame data the speedrun crowd dissects, and Super Mario World for arguably the most replayed cartridge of the era.

You don't need a console, a flash cart, or a resonant piece of ceramic to play them. Browse the full SNES library and start a game in your browser — Play Classic Games. No Downloads. Just Play.