That brings us to the latest update for storied, accuracy-obsessed SNES emulator bsnes, which adds the ability to overclock the virtual SNES processor.

While bsnes is far from the first SNES emulator to allow for simulated overclocking, it does seem to be the first that does so "without any framerate or pitch distortion, and without harming compatibility in 99% of games," as bsnes programmer byuu puts it.

But in some in-game situations, when the screen got too full of moving sprites, the processor could fail to create the next frame within the 16.66 ms window, leading to noticeable display lag.

Today's beefy PCs can of course simulate the SNES' RICO RA22 CPU at a rate much faster than its original 3.58MHz.

But because the system's games were designed with that particular clock rate in mind, that kind of overclocking has a tendency to speed up the video and audio, too, which can in turn make the games difficult or impossible to play (or even run, in some cases).

To fix this side effect, byuu borrowed a technique from elsewhere in the emulation community.