- cross-posted to:
- retrogaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- retrogaming@lemmy.world
Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you’ve probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early ‘90s.
The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles’ performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even ‘upgrade’, over time.
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You seem to truncate the most important part. It’s the sound processor getting faster, not nothing else.
This going to screw up all the Donkey Kong Country songs!
if the SPC is anything like most yamaha soundchips, once you write a value to it the console has to wait until a busy flag is cleared to write the next byte to the chip. unless you’re doing some very fancy multithreading, the CPU is just looping until it can do that. in this case because the SPC runs faster, the CPU is doing less waiting which leads to the game running faster
Sometimes it’s not about the destination but the journey!
