It's been 35 years since the SNES first launched as the Super Famicom in Japan, complete with a sound chip designed by the father of PlayStation himself, Ken Kutaragi. Over the past few weeks, Super Nintendo fans have made a curious discovery – that chip has been quietly overclocking itself over the decades, making SNES consoles run ever so slightly faster than they did back in the day.
The idea that "SNES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age" was posited back on February 26 via TASBot – the speedrunning robot operated by community figure Alan "dwangoAC" Cecil – alongside a call for data detailing exactly how quickly everyone's Super Nintendo is running. After well over 100 responses, the hypothesis is starting to seem pretty definitive. A SNES in 2025 is going to run faster than it did when it was originally manufactured.
The SNES has a pair of audio chips that work together to produce audio, including the SCP700 coprocessor designed by Kutaragi. As 404 Media reports based on an interview with Cecil, Nintendo's original developer documentation reported that the SCP700 ran with a digital signal processing, or DSP, rate of 32,000hz. By 2007, emulator developers had clocked the real-world DSP rate at 32,040Hz. In 2025, the data suggests the average is now 32,076Hz, with some units clocked as fast as 32,182Hz.
If audio data gets processed through the SNES faster, that speeds up one potential bottleneck on how fast the console can run a game. Depending on how the game is programmed, this could have a variety of effects, such as speeding up the loads between rooms in a game like Super Metroid. You might think this would have a big effect for speedrunners, but Cecil doesn't expect it to be profound.
"We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil tells 404 Media. “We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU." He believes even the fastest SNES units would likely only benefit a speedrun by a few frames – likely far less than a second – and the margins in most human speedrunning communities are typically larger than that. And, well... it's not like any speedrunner is suffering the disadvantage of a newly manufactured SNES in 2025.
But why are these chips faster now? That's the detail that hasn't been fully nailed down. Computer parts are obviously made up of physical materials, and those materials degrade and change over time. The SCP700's DSP rate is governed by a ceramic resonator, and ceramic is sensitive enough for these types of chips to fluctuate in performance based on temperature, similar to silicon producing minor differences in modern CPUs.
For now, it's probably safest to attribute all this to the simple entropy of the universe. Folks like Cecil will certainly be continuing in the research even as, day by day, our SNESes all get that tiny fraction faster.
Think of it this way: the best SNES games are now all that tiny bit better.
