SNES sound chip speeds up as it ages

[Random Encounter]

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/nintendo/snes-consoles-appear-to-run-faster-with-age-apu-frequency-increased-by-up-to-182-hz-after-35-years

This is kind of interesting to me, as I know capacitors go bad but never thought about the shelf life of timing crystals. Our hardware is getting older, necessitating hardware solutions like MiSTer and software emulators to pick up the slack. I'm amazed we still have Ataris in good working order.

[Selbaek]

Nothing lasts forever! Everything eventually degrades, and it's super important to get those preservation efforts better tuned and consistently updated!

[Wandervox]

When seeing an article about this, I recalled the speedrunning community's response to a discovery regarding the OG Xbox's optical drives. Different lots and revisions were manufactured with optical drives of different brands -- Thomson, Philips, Samsung, probably others I can't recall -- and, to my understanding, it was found that each had rather significant differences in cache or some such in the optical drives themselves. This ultimately resulted in loading speeds for some of the consoles faster than others. As such, many speedrunners sought after the consoles that had the optical drives that had the fastest load times, for obvious reasons.

I have to wonder how or if this timing change is going to have any effect on the speedrunning community. I would think it's not extremely likely, in this case, as the goal would theoretically become the adoption of technology that is literally as close to dying as possible. Still, stranger has happened.

[Althena]

That is interesting. I have a lot of old technology, but not as much as I used to. It's sad to think that however immaculately I take take care of my Dreamcast, one day it will just give out. Damn entropy.

[Random Encounter]

When seeing an article about this, I recalled the speedrunning community's response to a discovery regarding the OG Xbox's optical drives. Different lots and revisions were manufactured with optical drives of different brands -- Thomson, Philips, Samsung, probably others I can't recall -- and, to my understanding, it was found that each had rather significant differences in cache or some such in the optical drives themselves. This ultimately resulted in loading speeds for some of the consoles faster than others. As such, many speedrunners sought after the consoles that had the optical drives that had the fastest load times, for obvious reasons.

I have to wonder how or if this timing change is going to have any effect on the speedrunning community. I would think it's not extremely likely, in this case, as the goal would theoretically become the adoption of technology that is literally as close to dying as possible. Still, stranger has happened.

If my understanding of the article is right, it isn't so much causing the games themselves to run faster as the CPU and video chips are still keeping things synced. But it does run the risk of causing errors that may either crash the game or make hardware-verified, tool-assisted speedruns impossible.