90s Nintendo console runs faster as it gets older and no one knows why

SNES owners have been investigating a strange issue with their consoles where they seem to be getting faster the older they get.

It’s a fact of life that the older something gets, the slower and less reliable it becomes, and that’s just as applicable to video game consoles as anything. One of the greatest fears of any retro gamer is booting up their old console one day and finding out it no longer works.

After all, it’s not like you can easily go out and buy a new retro console, or even find parts to repair. And even if you did, there’s no guarantee what condition it would be in.

Although it turns out that one retro console is aging like fine wine. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as the SNES, is not only still popular 35 years after its original release but, bizarrely, it seems it runs faster now than it did back in 1990.

The discovery originates from a Bluesky thread made on February 26 by TASbot, or rather the team behind TASbot, which is a robot designed for tool assisted speedruns (i.e. completing games as quickly as possible).

The TASbot team noticed that the SNES’ audio processing unit (APU) often runs too fast, which causes game audio, such as music and sound effects, to become higher pitched.

In a reply to one follower, TASbot said, ‘The results we have show it is real. [sic] Consoles we measured are faster than the original specification. It will take research to determine why.’

As such, TASbot requested that anyone with a SNES run something called a smpspeed ROM test on their console and submit their results to an online form. The form was closed last week on March 6 and received 143 submissions.

Based on 143 responses, the SNES DSP rate averages 32,076 Hz, rising 8 Hz from cold to warm. Warm DSP rates go from 31,965 to 32,182 Hz, a 217 Hz range. Therefore, temperature is less significant. Why? How does it affect games? We do not know. Yet. See for more.

We’re not going to pretend we completely understand the data compiled (which can be viewed here), but the takeaway is that, yes, the SNES’s APU runs faster in 2025 than it did in 1990.

The APU was also discovered to run faster at higher temperatures, but TASbot deems the impact ‘less significant’ and that a hotplate% speedrun wouldn’t help with reducing time.

That last bit sounds like a joke but, as Kotaku reported in 2020, Japanese speedrunners discovered an important glitch in Dragon Quest 3 was more likely to trigger at higher temperatures, prompting some to use hotplates to heat up the SNES.

We can’t imagine forcibly raising the temperature of a SNES is good for its internals. Plus, if multiple consoles are experiencing this, it could be a foreboding sign that they’re inching ever closer to death.

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