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.
AFAIK the overall execution speed of the old consoles was always intimately tied to the video refresh rate, not audio. I don’t have much experience programming the SNES specifically, but from what I do know about it and my experience with other retro consoles, I don’t imagine that the sound processor running ever so slightly faster will change the speed of the game overall. Not even to the degree of “less than one second over an entire playthrough” as suggested by the article.
If the oscillator goes far enough out of spec, it may lead to audio glitches and possibly even complete crashes, but I doubt that many games – frankly, any games at all – are busy-waiting on the sound processor as their main way of keeping time.
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OK, I just took a short break. I’ve done a little reading about the potential issue from first sources, and brushed up on the SNES hardware. To reiterate, I still don’t believe that any game will run even one frame faster due to this issue. However, what does seem to be at stake is tool-assisted spreedruns on original hardware. If this oscillator speeds up just a little, but not enough to cause software issues, there’s a chance that controller inputs may be read slightly earlier than otherwise expected (due to the slightly faster audio system finishing earlier), potentially causing a desynchronization with sub-frame accurate hardware input tools, meaning that a TAS may run correctly on one console but not another.
While this is an important issue in the TAS community, I don’t see how this could result in an otherwise “correct” run finishing even one frame faster, as the inputs will still only be read by the game once (or however many times the game normally reads them) per field (“frame”), and the game will still be using the video vertical blank for main timing.