snes ahoy

lol the writing in that time.com thing is aneurysm inducing

There's another Super Nintendo on the block, and this one means business.

Not the lucrative sort Nintendo's sold out Super NES Classic seems to be doing as availability bulletins circulate like whispers of a ghost. Nor the steady sort Nintendo's handheld 3DS has been up to for years, dishing up choice SNES downloads by way of its Virtual Console. But business the way an audio engineer means when retooling decades-old tunes for playback on modern audio hardware. Or as a film preservationist does when cleaning and converting acetate film to digital ones and zeroes.

It's called the Super Nt, plays some of the medium's most treasured games (like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), and judging from the literature its Seattle-based boutique hardware-maker sent over, it's poised to be a Super Nintendo nonpareil

I browsed through 6 or 7 articles and that was the only one with expressive language that matched my excitement. I couldn't read it in one go but in bits between looking up at the tv.

> that wants to stick a million roms on an SD Card.

Oh, do these things do that? I always got the impression they were just designed to play the original physical carts rather than roms.

“The Super NT also includes an SD card slot, ostensibly for firmware updates; however, shortly after releasing the NT mini, Horton released a jailbroken firmware unofficially, which supports ROM playback and, most notably, new “core” support. After 12 releases, culminating in the 2.0 firmware, the NT mini simulates everything from the Atari 7800, the Sega Master System, and the original Game Boy to lesser-known consoles like the Channel F and Adventurevision. Horton’s decades spent decoding the intricacies of video game hardware found a readily available home in the NT mini, and the Super NT should be similar.“

judging from the literature its Seattle-based boutique hardware-maker sent over

luv2breathlessly recycle marketing materials as copy

Oh wow, yeah these are much more tempting then than the way they're marketed would suggest.

Yeah a pinnacle 16-bit system that is $260 less than the pinnacle 8-bit system

lol at the way they described a FPGA in the press release, though

flowery, but good to know. i didn't realize myself this was hardware simulation vs. software emulation

I mean the reason you'd ship it with a FPGA is to simulate different processors, but their marketing only mentions the one

The other reason would be that you don't think you'd sell enough, or actually having chips manufactured would run afoul of actually licensing. Generally a FPGA is used when you're designing a chip. If your intention was to make it run exactly like one specific processor, then... use your FPGA instructions to have someone manufacture that processor

The marketing only mentioned NES for the 8-bit Analogue NT Mini but all the other early systems were casually dumped on the internet via jailbreak firmware from Analogue’s coder himself (Kevtris). As for licensing on things like the super fx chip there might be workarounds in writing code differently and providing the same result. I fully expect the Super Nt to get jailbreak firmware for Genesis, Turbografx 16, and Neo Geo. I hope it includes all the 8-bit and prior cores as well.

Nevertheless, I can wait til Febuary to find out more.

just got one from amazon.fr via stockinformer, thanks jimd

they always alert me just in time for me to miss it

Ha you’re welcome. Been playing Micro Machines on mine this week, and enjoying it more than mariokart.

Oh man I forgot about Micro Machines, that's a definite reason to hack. Are there any drawbacks? Was it easy enough?

It was astoundingly easy, to the extent that it's ridiculous to even call it a hack. It was easier than adding songs to my second gen ipod was! Hackchi is pretty lovely, it'll even do things like auto-googling box art for the menus.

Drawbacks I guess are that a) not everything works (but hackchi warns you which games won't and lets you decide not to add them), b) the interface isn't designed for huge lists of games, which forces you to use subfolders, which is just slightly clunky. Not a massive deal at all though.

It's also possible to install other emulators so that the games which otherwise don't work become playable, the software also offers to do this for you, haven't tried that yet though.

mentioned elsewhere (even on this thread i think!) but:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/one-upping-the-nes-classic-edition-with-the-raspberry-pi-3-and-retropie/

I probably mentioned it? I've got one with a custom interface skin that resembles the NES Classic. Was very fun to curate.

any update on hacking this for people using a mac (without parallels etc)?

I got one! A little Christmas gift to myself. Never heard of Earthbound in all my time as a console enthusiast. What's the deal with that?

Are you from Earth?

Between the poor sales and the phasing out of the Super NES, the game did not receive a European release.

I came across it 15/20 years later via the internet

i remember reading about it in super play and i'm looking forward to playing it nearly 25 years later

( had my snes classic shipped to family in the UK from amazon.fr, so i don't actually have mine yet)

it's the best

I play Earthbound once a year, like a digital hajj.

im on earth btw

I'm on my way there

I did the next level of mod on this thing today, which is installing retroarch. Now it plays all the SNES games (including ones the built in emulator didn’t support) but also all the NES and Gameboy and GBA and, man, it’s pretty amazing (it’ll also do non-Nintendo consoles and n64 but I’m sticking with these for now)

i read about it in super play and played it on emulator in the early 2000s. it's very good, one of the best games on SNES

do the pads on this feel like an actual snes?

is jailbreaking it more or less work than setting up a raspberry pi?

Raspberry pi is at least an evening’s work, this is 20 minutes. And requires a lot less know how. Even installing the extra emulator was literally “download the zip, drag it over to the hackchi window, drop it, click ok”.

And I think the pads feel right? Although I’ve never used a brand new SNES pad before so can’t say for sure, the d-pads do feel stiff but I’m guessing that’s normal.

yeah the pads are pretty close to a new SNES. had a few sessions w this and it felt exactly like playing og hardware.

Are there wireless controllers available for the SNES? The cords are sort of a dealbreaker for me

https://www.amazon.com/8Bitdo-Wireless-Controller-Classic-super-nintendo/dp/B074HBNNH6/
these are very good

also if i had a classic, this would be an instabuy
https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Deluxe-Carrying-Super-Nintendo-Console/dp/B075MXXHCG

I've got one of the those 8bitdos. The d-pad is a little loose but it's otherwise fantastic, and the bluetooth wireless feature is great.

Oh wait that's a newer one than I have in that link. I wonder how it compares.

I'm addicted to Earthbound. It's wonderful. Kind of wish we had a separate thread for it, but I don't know what the point of it would be...

spooky shit in earthbound

SNES classic finally available at walmart.com right now. I should probably snag it...
...welp it disappeared in the time it took me to write this post, good job me

time to re-examine yr priorities dude

Yeah. Snag first write post AFTER

i know! such shame ;_;

got one

https://toadle.me/2017/02/03/how-to-add-more-games-to-you-nes-mini-classic-using-hakchi2-and-a-mac.html

OK I just got one too. I don't know how, but apparently Gamestop has them for more than an hour tops these days because people have started to give up seeking them out.

4 million units sold, apparently? I'm surprised it's that high, given that they're only releasing ten units to market every week.

Like, hey, Nintendo: I've never owned any of your systems except a Game Boy thirty years ago but I'm interested in giving you my money in exchange for one of these things but also only if you stop making it an enormous pain in the ass for me to give you my money.

Corporations are so fucken dumb, I swear.

it's just faintly possible that they're having trouble manufacturing a mass-produced item to meet demand, and not that they're deliberately withholding from individual people who have bought one (1) thing from them in the last 129 years