SNES Classic Coming Sep 29th, Includes 2 Controllers & 21 Games--Including the Unreleased Star Fox 2

If someone would deny you the ability to buy an electronic that plays video games just so they can make money imagine what people will do when society collapses. They'll cut off your head while you're sleeping for a can of beans.

 

Scary thought...

 

I decided to try my luck and order one online on September 29th, and managed to score one on ThinkGeek's website. Just waiting for it to be shipped now.

 

ridiculous how many are in ebay for $150+. just saw a cinemassacre youtube video were they talked about waiting in line to get one and hearing all the people talking how they are only buyin them to resell and how much they are goin to make off them

 

I didn't say that at all, but you wouldn't rather have the used SNES and games that $80 could buy you? It would be real, and you could get other games for it.

 

The biggest appeal is the brand backing.

I wouldn't touch a generic system-on-a-chip in a fake SNES case, but it's from Nintendo and they threw in Star Fox 2. In that scenario, it's a nice, portable, HD-friendly alternative to a real console with upscaling equipment and a huge cart collection. We all know which is purer at the end of the day and the most hardcore solution gets the most props for keeping the dream alive.

How does SNES Classic hold up with custom chip games like Mega Man X2/X3? It has some SA-1/SFX (2) roms on stock and they were usually harder to emulate than the rest of them. I'm guessing the emulator works with everything. It would be an interesting surprise to hear that certain roms don't boot.

 

I thought the NES Classic had the same issue initially. Certain games wouldn't boot because the mappers were not supported. Maybe someone has found a workaround by now.

I wouldn't be surprised is Mega Man X2/3 didn't boot due to the same issue.

 

They already booted MMX2 with the CX4 chip. It seems their emulator implements it. Check on Reddit, the snesclassichack snesclassicmods and minisnesmods subreddits I think.

I'm actually impressed by the experience. Feels extremely smooth and well integrated, fast to boot and failsafe. I'd argue it is a better experience than typical emulators. Now if we can add Chrono Trigger to it, it'd be perfect.

The controllers alone are almost worth the price. I'll probably buy/build a USB converter for them.

 

It appears to be the same, or at least, a very similar emulator to what was used on Wii U (and probably wii). I think the sound emulation is different though (not for the better though..). It is smooth and fast, and is great as is. I think a Raspberry Pi is still a better option overall, but, this is good, if for nothing more than decent controller and ready out of the box.

 

+1 That's the only thing missing out of the box! I would've happily traded Kirby's Dream Course for Chrono Trigger

 

Spoiler Alert: https://www.instagram.com/p/BZtsOuCHBXe/

 

That went fast
I do wonder how long it will take before the same emulation / frontend will be launched on the Switch.

 

Chances are the emulator is mostly stolen code from open source projects. Most commercial uses of emulation seem to do that.

I'm not sure by what you mean by being better than typical emulators. Are you thinking because it's from Nintendo it's somehow better? I can guarantee you it's not. The best SNES emulator to date is the emulator formerly known as BSNES (now HIGAN I think) which has had countless hours of work put into it. Pretty sure no SNES emulator beats it in accuracy.

It's a neat toy, but it's not for the "hardcore" retro gamer in my opinion. It's for those who have some interest but don't want to invest that much into it. And maybe somewhat for collectors, and probably mostly it's appeal is to scalpers and speculators.

@notataco64, Upscaling Equipment? There is no upscaling equipment, it's an emulator. You need a scaler for original hardware, this is just a ARM based SoC running some sort of Linux OS I believe. Also, SNES system clones actually tend to work quite a lot better than NES or Genesis clones for some reasons related to their designs. Infact the main issue with the clones seems to be they only offer Composite or S-Video outputs and never RGB which is a shame.

Back to the SNES Classic, it's too bad they still didn't think to add some kind of E-Shop to it. Though maybe it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

 

@MottZilla

What I mean is that the user experience is top notch. It boots in seconds, the UI is responsive, the controls are snappy, and the features are simple yet useful without, features creep. It makes me want to play its games.

I don't agree with your assumption that it uses open source projects for the emulator program. Nintendo is a very honest company, and they distribute all the open source library they use in their projects with the source code on their website.

Keep in mind Nintendo is full of very talented coders and hardware designers, with enormous resources and access to the complete design and documentation of everything in the hardware. It's their day job to develop this, and it's probably the same codebase as the Wii (U) virtual console.

Maybe they aren't aiming for perfect clock-by-clock accuracy like BSNES, I don't know, but it sure feels perfect, and that's what matters.

You'd be amazed by the amount of work a team of 10 full-time programmers can produce with proper documentation, versus someone (even a professional programmer) working on his free time with little to no documentation.

 

From what I've read, it's not uncommon for some of these older systems to not actually be fully understood by their own companies. Talking about the nitty gritty details. Sure, Nintendo should have the resources to do it, but I don't see why anyone can assume they did it that way. Again given what others have done in the past, it's not unlikely that they referenced existing projects. I know I used the word stolen, for effect. It really depends on the projects license and also it's a bit of a matter of opinion. We would expect a big company like Nintendo to do it themselves. But they certainly could have used others work to "help". Infact the documentation on the NES/Famicom made by fans is way better than any documentation Nintendo put out. This is likely true of the SNES and Gameboy too.

I haven't looked but I've never heard of Nintendo distributing any sort of source code. I also don't see how you hold them up as honest, when it is well known they had rather shady business practices in the past. Ones that did their best to snuff out the TurboGrafx 16 and hurt the Sega Genesis.

I would not be amazing by the about of work a team of 10 paid professionals versus a fan. Yes, if you have the people with the right skills and pay them money to just work on your project it'll definitely make more rapid progress than someone doing it in their free time as a passion project. This is the same reason that in the 80s and 90s a game would be developed in a matter of months to at most a couple years but for modern day hobby developers it takes far, far longer, if they ever manage to finish their project.

Anyway, the point I'm making is it's a neat toy. I'm not bashing it saying it's useless or anything like that. But it's not technically impressive to me. What would impress me is new SNES silicon. If it was a system using an actual SNES chipset with built in games with analog AV out or both analog and digital AV it would be very cool. But no, it's an ARM SoC running an emulator. Sure it might be nice, but it's not for me. I'll stick with my actual SNES. If I want to play on an emulator I'd rather use them on my PC.

 

All of Nintendo OSS:
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/
SNES classic/mini OSS (395MB zipped): https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/data/SuperNESClassicEdition_OSS.zip

Nintendo are drowning in money, it wouldn't make any sense for them to steal OSS covertly. Also, if they legally use open-source emulators, they'd have to release their modified source, and they certainly don't want to do that. Also, while aggressive business practices are part of doing business, using OSS without complying with its license is downright illegal.

I was sceptical too at first given it was an emulation box, but it's really a great user experience. Now, whatever floats your boat.

No offense intended, but I feel like you're romantising Homebrew development. Homebrew developers are often extremely skilled individuals – they have to if they're gonna work with so little official information – but even they would love internal documentation. If you'd give them this, and a full-time job working on their project, we'd be years ahead already in terms of emulation.

Of course reverse engineered documentation made by fans is better than what Nintendo "put out". It's the part they don't put out that'd be actually invaluable for an engineer/programmer. When you don't have to reverse engineer, emulation is much easier to implement.

 

History is your alley

http://www.ushistory.org/civ/6f.asp

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/8-reasons-why-rome-fell

This shit got dark...lets go play Earthboun....Oh wait doesn't that exact thing happen near the end?

 

The tools to add games to the snes classic and reset using the controller has been released!

https://github.com/ClusterM/hakchi2/releases

BTW after playing for a few hours, I'm pretty confident that the reason it feels so great is the input responsiveness. It's much better than most emulators I've played, especially those on the pi. Feels like the real deal.

 

Boom!

 

How much does the Super Famicom mini goes for in Japan at retail?