The SNES Seems To Be Getting Faster Over Time

March 24, 2025 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Every Super Nintendo console should run at the same speed. They were all built in factories with the same components so they should all operate at the steady clip mandated by Nintendo all those years ago. Except, apparently, the SNES is speeding up as it gets older.

The matter was brought to the public’s attention by the [TASBot] team, a group within the speedrunning community. If anyone was going to notice vintage consoles suddenly running a hair faster, you could bet it would be the speedrunners. Soon enough, a call was put out to crowdsource some data. Submitters were asked to run a set piece of code to test the DSP sample rate on consoles when cold and warm, to get the best idea of what was going on.

As reported by Ars Technica, the group seems to have pinned down the problem to the SNES’s Audio Processing Unit. It’s supposed to run at 24.576 MHz, with a sample rate of 32,000 Hz. However, over the years, emulator developers and speedrunners had noticed that 32,040 Hz seemed to be a more realistic figure for what real consoles were actually running the DSP sample rate at. Developers found that building emulators to run the DSP at this rate was important to run commercial games as expected, suggesting the hardware might have always been a little faster than expected.

However, more recently, it seems that the average speed of the DSP sample rate has increased further. The average result collected by [TASBot] from modern consoles is 32,076 Hz. What’s more interesting is the range of submitted figures—from 31,976 Hz to 32,349 Hz. It seems that the DSP’s ceramic resonator—used instead of a quartz crystal—might degrade over time, causing the speedup. [TASBot] team members also tested temperature changes, but only found a 32 Hz variation from a frozen SNES to one at room temperature.

The fact that console components degrade over time isn’t exactly news; we’ve featured plenty of articles on leaky batteries and corroded traces. Still, for speedrunners, the idea that the hardware standard itself can shift over time? It’s like feeling quicksand under your feet. What even is reality anymore?

[Thanks to s7726 for the tip!]

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Grasshopper Typewriter

March 24, 2025 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

Do you consider your keyboard to be a fragile thing? Meet the glass keyboard by [BranchNo9329], which even has a glass PCB. At least, I think the whole thing is glass.

The back side of an all-glass keyboard. Yeah. — Image via [BranchNo9329] via reddit

There are so frustratingly few details that this might as well have been a centerfold, but I thought you all should see it just the same. What we do have are several pictures and a couple of really short videos, so dive in.

I can tell you that [BranchNo2939] chose a glass substrate mainly due to curiosity about its durability compared with FR4. And that the copper circuitry was applied with physical vapor deposition (PVD) technology.

Apparently one of [BranchNo2939]’s friends is researching the bonding of copper on to glass panels, so they thought they’d give a keyboard a go. Right now the thing is incomplete — apparently there’s going to be RGB. Because of course there’s going to be RGB. Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Grasshopper Typewriter” →

Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth Wants Bad Bots To Get Endlessly Lost

March 24, 2025 by Donald Papp 37 Comments

Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution? AI Labyrinth, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure.

This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t respect things like “no crawl” directives, which accounts for an ever-growing amount of traffic. Last year we saw Cloudflare step up their game in identifying and blocking such activity, but the whole thing is akin to an arms race. Those intent on hoovering up all the data they can are constantly shifting tactics in response to mitigations, and simply identifying bad actors with honeypots and blocking them doesn’t really do the job any more. In fact, blocking requests mainly just alerts the baddies to the fact they’ve been identified.

Instead of blocking requests, Cloudflare goes in the other direction and creates an all-you-can-eat sprawl of linked AI-generated content, luring crawlers into wasting their time and resources as they happily process an endless buffet of diverse facts unrelated to the site being crawled, all while Cloudflare learns as much about them as possible.

That’s an important point: the content generated by the Labyrinth might be pointless and irrelevant, but it isn’t nonsense. After all, the content generated by the Labyrinth can plausibly end up in training data, and fraudulent data would essentially be increasing the amount of misinformation online as a side effect. For that reason, the human-looking data making up the Labyrinth isn’t wrong, it’s just useless.

It’s certainly a clever method of dealing with crawlers, but the way things are going it’ll probably be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later, as the next move in the arms race gets made.

Rolling Foam Cutter Gives Mattress A Close Shave

March 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation that [Raph] recently found himself in was a combination of several of these aspects, which makes his success all the sweeter.

The problem? [Raph] had a pair of foam mattresses from his camper van that needed to be made thinner — each of the three inch (7.62 cm) pieces of foam needed to have one inch (2.5 cm) shaved off as neatly and evenly as possible. Trying to pull that off over the length of a mattress with any kind of manual tools was obviously a no-go, so he built a low-rider foam cutter.

With the mattresses laying on the ground, the idea was to have the cutter simply roll across them. The cutter uses a 45″ (115 cm) long 14 AWG nichrome wire that’s held in tension with a tension arm and bungee cords, which is juiced up with a Volteq HY2050EX 50 V 20 A variable DC power supply. [Raph] determined the current experimentally: the wire failed at 20 A, and cutting speed was too low at 12 A. In the end, 15 A seemed to be the sweet spot.

The actual cutting process was quite slow, with [Raph] finding that the best he could do was about 1/8″ (3 mm) per second on the wider of the two mattresses. While the result was a nice flat cut, he does note that at some point the mattresses started to blister, especially when the current was turned up high. We imagine this won’t be a big deal for a mattress though, as you can simply put that side on the bottom.

In the end, the real problem was the smell. As [Raph] later discovered, polyurethane foam is usually cut mechanically, as cutting it with a hot wire gives off nasty fumes. Luckily he had plenty of ventilation when he was making his cuts, but he notes that the mattresses themselves still have a stink to them a couple days later. Hopefully they’ll finish outgassing before his next camping trip.

As you can imagine, we’ve covered a great number of DIY foam cutters over the years, ranging from the very simple to computerized marvels. But even so, there’s something about the project-specific nature of this cutter that we find charming.

Next time on Star Trek: EmptyEpsilon... (Credit: EmptyEpsilon project)

Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon

March 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.

Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.

The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.

Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.

“Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build

March 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but by the time you’re making a second, it’s time to build a machine to do the work for you.

So maybe we quibble with the channel name “Unnecessary Automation,” but we won’t quibble with the results. It’s a machine that orients a sphere, drills the hole, inserts the plastic wire, glues it together with a UV-curing glue, and then trims the end off. And if you like crazy machines, it’s a beauty.

The video goes through all of the design thoughts in detail, but it’s when it comes time to build the machine that the extra-clever bits emerge. For instance, [UA] used a custom 3D-printed peristaltic pump to push the glue out. Taking the disadvantage of peristaltic pumps – that they pulse – as an advantage, a custom housing was designed that dispensed the right amount between the rollers. The rolling glue dispenser mechanism tips up and back to prevent drips.

There are tons of other project-specific hacks here, from the form on the inside of the sphere that simplifies optic bundling and routing to the clever use of a razor blade as a spring. Give it a watch if you find yourself designing your own wacky machines. We think Rube Goldberg would approve. Check out this video for a more software-orientated take on fiber-optic displays.

Continue reading ““Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build” →

Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025

March 23, 2025 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025” →