[HN Gopher] Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected an...
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Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected and why it's a
problem
Author : plzdotheneedful
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-03-15 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| dlachausse wrote:
| Emulation either via FPGA or software is really the only solution
| to preserving retro gaming and computing in the long term.
| Electronic hardware is very difficult to keep alive for decades.
| mindslight wrote:
| Replace the resonator?
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Indeed, there is some ongoing work towards creating a mod
| that replaces the APU clock with a circuit that derives a
| signal from the CPU master clock.
| keygen_music wrote:
| Sounds like a good idea but we're talking about the TAS and
| speedrunning community specifically. Wouldn't it count as a
| console mod and therefore delegitimise their runs?
| NobodyNada wrote:
| It depends on the game and community; but generally
| speaking, console mods don't delegitimize a run if they
| don't change the behavior of the game in an illegitimate
| way. It's common for top-level runners to play on consoles
| with modded video encoding hardware for better picture
| quality, for example.
|
| When it comes to TAS specifically, most SNES TASes cannot
| be replayed on console _at all_ because the hardware is too
| nondeterministic -- the same exact input will not give you
| the same behavior. It 's usually something trivial like an
| extra frame spent waiting for a sound effect, but that can
| cause you to (for example) enter the next room with
| different RNG state, causing enemies to behave completely
| differently, etc.
|
| So being able to console-verify a TAS on a modded console,
| with a clearly-defined hardware mod that picks a single
| deterministic behavior from the set of observed behaviors
| on unmodded hardware, would be a strict improvement over
| the current status quo of only being able to replay these
| TASes in emulators.
| mindslight wrote:
| Replacing an aging part with the same part would hopefully
| be considered a repair, and in any case it's definitely
| less invasive than emulating the whole system instead.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Failing hardware isn't the problem. The consoles are showing
| nondeterministic behavior (slight variations in audio/video
| sync), and probably did from the factory.
| wtallis wrote:
| The article repeatedly describes clock frequencies that drift
| further out of spec as the systems age. That's failing
| hardware.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| The clock frequencies are not "out of spec" -- the
| manufacturing tolerance is 32,000 +/- 0.5%, and virtually
| all the measured consoles are well within that range. The
| manufacturer additionally specifies a maximum of 0.3%
| variation due to temperature and 0.2% due to aging.
|
| There's also no evidence that the clocks are drifting
| further due to age. We don't have data for what APU
| frequencies used to be; we have a single measurement from
| over 20 years ago suggesting that one particular console
| had a DSP sample rate of 32,040 Hz, which is slightly lower
| than the current measured average of 32,075 but still well
| within the range of consoles we've looked at today.
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