A strange phenomenon is detected in these SNES and the investigation of the “rejuvenated consoles” enigma is on

In a phenomenon that has baffled the gaming community, users around the world have reported that the so-called Super Nintendo (SNES) seems to operate at a faster speed as time goes by. The reason behind this behavior remains unexplained, which has sparked intense research within a very specific and niche group of enthusiasts.

Member of the TASBot speedrun community, known as dwangoAC, has been one of the leaders of the research. Through measurements, he discovered that the operating frequency of the SNES has increased over time. Consoles are known to use a crystal oscillator and a ceramic oscillator to generate the clock frequency that synchronizes their processes, with the ceramic oscillator operating at higher performance. An increase in this frequency could explain the apparent “speeding up” of the console.

In the world of speedrun, where every fraction of a second counts, some controversy had been raging for some time, since verified results of times achieved for games on real consoles were absolutely impossible to replicate on emulators with a strict specification of the machine’s times and frequencies. That’s when the suspicion began to arise that the machines were running at speeds that were not originally theirs.

To analyze this strange occurrence, dwangoAC and other users conducted tests with different SNES, measuring their performance at various temperatures. The results indicated that heat could influence speed, although not to a sufficient degree to fully explain the phenomenon. Differences of up to 217 Hz in operating frequency were recorded, but the exact cause remains undetermined. To the normal human eye, the difference is imperceptible, but the professional speedrun player would detect differences in their learned patterns, differences that are much more apparent when software analysis comes into play.

Despite speculation, the data collected so far suggests that the temperature increase is not primarily responsible for the change in SNES processing speed, although it was one of the most likely hypotheses. Allan Cecil, the person behind user dwangoAC, sentences in Ars Technica that, “If you want to deliberately create a source of randomness and non-deterministic behavior, having two clock sources independently spinning against each other is a fantastic choice,” he said not without some derision. The research will continue.

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