Classic-gaming archaeology doesn't always revolve around digging out rare and unreleased games. Sometimes, it's about taking well-known relics and reconstructing them from newly unearthed and higher-fidelity original component parts. As a result, this week, one of the biggest games of all time now sounds completely different .

Remastering the Super Mario World soundtrack in this way means diving deep into the world of compressed video game audio samples. These were most common in the late cartridge era; they were nestled between the literal bleeps and bloops of the earliest video game sound chips and the CD-quality audio of the optical disc. Games in this era would frequently chain together brief snippets of recorded audio and replay them over and over with different effects, as if they'd been loaded into an electronic keyboard.

The game cartridges couldn't store much data, of course, so the original synthesizer samples usually took a heavy hit in fidelity during the transition to game soundtracks. "The composer [often felt] obligated to sacrifice sound quality to get their music running without any lag and fit into the cartridge," said Michael, a video game music source investigator from El Salvador (who didn't share his last name). "Especially if all the audio work is made by the CPU (like on the Nintendo 64), this limitation can distort how the music sounds. In some ways, this isn't the best take of the game's music."

Enlarge / We're so close to having an emulator that can perfectly recreate every single function of real SNES hardware and software. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the lead coder of bsnes , I've been attempting to perfect Super Nintendo emulation for the past 15 years . We are now at a point where that goal is in sight, but there we face one last challenge: accurate cycle timing of the SNES video processors. Getting that final bit of emulation accuracy will require a community effort that I hope some of you can help with. But first, let me recap how far we've come.

Where we are

Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club , an exercise bike , or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable, and no game is known to have any glaring issues.

SNES emulation has gotten so precise that I've even taken to splitting my emulator into two versions: higan , which focuses on absolute accuracy and hardware documentation; and bsnes , which focuses on performance, features, and ease-of-use.