You know for $190 this has me highly tempted. I grew up on the NES from its earliest days and SNES too, but I find it easier these days to go back to and enjoy SNES stuff or find something new. With this device not using the usual insane pricing levels ($500~) for a system I won't be ignoring it.

The fact that the developer made so called unofficial firmware for it that allowed a lot of systems to load off the NES via the SD card slot and the fact he's more teasing and not saying a direct NO for this SNES system the stuff I'm reading about the SD2SNES looking pretty silly seems about right. If this comes out, and that multi-system firmware gets blown out imagine all the consoles you could run using a comfy SNES controller on a HDMI system with a FPGA built like a proverbial tank in comparison to the usual gutter level chinese junk hyperkin and retrobit releases. It is a big enough but plausible IF at this point but if that custom homebrew hits imagine all the 8 and 16bit stuff that could be thrown at it using the NES as an example. Outside of using original media, sends multiple systems including the Retron and retrofreak into the proverbial garbage unless you're really hung up on those save states.

Pretty much. I can't even fathom why the negativity for this thing. It's from the same creators of the NT Mini, but at AVS pricing and the future potential for a jailbreak firmware, announcements forthcoming. (crosses fingers).

One potential hangup with running jailbreak ROMs would be the expansion chips. It is possible an FPGA SNES may be capable of fully supporting the SNES plus running bog standard ROMs, but run into hiccups when emulating expansion chips. The expansion chips may be too fast or complex to emulate, or simply run out of blocks when adding the expansion hardware to the SNES core. That said, running SNES ROMs would be like having an SNES plus the Everdrive, with carts necessary for the expansion chip games.

And you'd still get the entire jailbreak backlog of the NES Mini, plus enough horsepower to run Genesis ROMs.

And I disagree with the sentiments that jailbreak will never happen because it detracts NT Mini or future console sales. Collectors who own cart based systems such as Genesis and Atari will still want dedicated hardware to run their carts.

Regardless, even if the jailbreak firmware never materializes for the Super NT, we still get a spiritual successor to the AVS at a similar price point. And that is a console worth owning. So I put my money down for one and if the NT Mini is any consolance, the Super NT Mini will not disappoint.

That's where I'm at. Kevtris has already proven himself twice over with the Hi-Def NES and the Analogue NT Mini, which is why I'm willing to take the proverbial blind jump on the Super NT. Even if the jailbroken firmware doesn't materialize, it's still gonna be the best way to play SNES out there (unless you want analog video, but that's been pointed out ad nausem here).

There is no possible way there won't be all the NT mini cores and a SNES core at release or very soon after. The other 16-bit cores may take some time however.

@bouncekdelamos

You are literally describing the Super NT, preorder away  

I can't wait until February now :/

I thoght the worst part was the fact they spelt it Analogue. 
 
 

In all seriousness, take the $450 NT Mini, subtract $200 for the milled aluminum brick, $60 for the 8bitdo controller + receiver, and that leaves $190, close to the price of the AVS. Add a beefier FPGA for running SNES/16-bits and it's quite a steal at just $5 over the AVS.

No, it's not really effective, but if you want to compare yourself to him, feel free.

Hmm this is very exciting! Im wondering if the Nt Mini will get the cores this one is getting though? They are both using a cyclone V, so I would hope people who paid the 450 for the Nt Mini don't get a machine that does 1/2 as much. I guess we will have to wait and see. 

I wouldn't assume that. If the details of Kevin's deal with Analogue include royalties for each unit sold then Kevin has a vested interest in selling both. He also won't need to re-engineer the cartridge adapters he's already made.

Granted, I still wouldn't be interested in the NT Mini, but it wouldn't be all bad: it also gives him incentive to develop even more cores to differentiate the Super NT. If he wants people who weren't interested before to buy both then they'll have to make an NT Mini MkII/Lite with an even lower cost (or bundled adapter boards).

 

This sounds really interesting. I never really followed the NT because of the price point. Is this likely to sell out/not be restocked for awhile? I'm pretty sure that they charge you when you place the order and not when it ships. Since it's not coming out until February it's not something I'm ready to pay for up front right now, especially with the $40 shipping, but I'm worried they might not last too long.

Also is there a source for this working with all SNES ROMs? I was thinking about ordering the SD2SNES on Black Friday but I know that has compatibility issues with a handful of games. This seems like a pretty good alternative for only $50 more.

I love when greedy americans spew some nonsense they think they heard in business 101.  Analogue (and definitely Kevtris) do not care about money 1st, they care about product 1st.

They are making the best product they can, and that includes all the cores they can throw at it, as soon as they can throw at it.  They can't say so publically and never will because it's ILLEGAL.... Notice how they always skate around the issue?  There will be no limitations on what Kevtris does with this machine other than the limitations of the FPGA, none.

"The whole beginning of Analogue and the kind of products we've wanted to make is this holy grail, end-all, pedestal sort of thing," Analogue CEO and founder Christopher Taber tells me during a Skype call from Hong Kong, where the company keeps a second office to monitor its supply chain. "It's a have every single feature and every single detail you can possibly imagine and make it as good as it can possibly be mindset. You don't see a lot of products in any category that do that, because obviously that ends up making them very expensive."

If anyone wants to bet me the NT mini cores won't be ported to this thing immediately or shortly after release, I'm taking all comers, as much as you wanna bet... 

I'm not making bets either way, but I will probably buy one if all the vintage cores get ported to it. I sure don't see that as a sure thing so I'm out until it exists and I can easily buy adapters. I have faith in Kevtris' work but stopped placing bets on gaming hopes and dreams long ago  

Also the Cyclone V has 6 different variants according to their website. They say they're using a more powerful, more expensive FPGA so it's probable it's not the same hardware as the Nt Mini.

it's the A4, mini has the A2
 

ShinigamiKiba, is that you? How's Macedonia?  

So, question. Why is it ok to sell this system with an SNES Core out of the box, but every other core is illegal?

It's not that playing the ROMs is "illegal." It isn't. It's more that they don't want there to be any question that this is primarily intended for legitimate use to play real games that people legitimately own. It only has an SNES slot, sooo... yeah.

In the past Nintendo blocked imports of perfectly legitimate unofficial N64 devkits by arguing that the "primary use" was for game piracy. The company disabled the backup function and allowed users to re-enable it with a "backup enabled" BIOS update, which you couldn't find on their website but could find in certain places literally the moment the original went live. This was before the DMCA.

Sometimes it's out of an abundance of caution. Galoob/Codemasters and their Game Genie were sued for making and profiting from derivative works of a copyrighted product but the US courts shot that down and allowed the Game Genie to exist.

Datel still feared exposing themselves to a similar lawsuit with the Action Replay so they disassociated themselves from their American distributor, Interact, and Interact released it under a different name ("GameShark"). Interact and Datel had public statements on their websites that their companies and products were different and had nothing to do with each other even though you could clearly see "Datel" inside a GameShark. Interact probably agreed to take on all responsibility for releasing it in the USA to limit Datel's potential liability.

Since the DMCA, several other devices have adopted similar techniques to avoid lawsuits. The ViperGC modchip could not play backups unless you loaded "unofficial" Cobra FW on it. Of course, "Cobra" was ready before the "Viper" mod chip was released! They acted like it was just an IPL for running Linux. A lot of XBOX mod chips were the same way.

Memor32 was basically a commercial version of the Free Memory Card Boot exploit for PS2 but they sold it as a USB memory card that could copy saves to/from your PC. They pretended that a separate Russian hacker group called "Team Memento" turned it into a piracy device that could boot backups and bootlegs. A real third-party hacker group would have known perfectly well how to install the same exploit on a standard memory card but, instead, it was restricted to the Memor32 until FMCB blew the lid open. The "unrelated hacker group" said that it required a Memor32 for some unspecified technical reason that they never divulged and that clearly was not true.​

While a device that plays ROMs would not be illegal on its own unless it breaks a copy protection or violates a patent/copyright to do so (includes original BIOS or something), they don't want any trouble. Understandable. Dude. I'm probably more excited for this than you but you're totally stepping on my toes too. I'm "greedy" because I acknowledge that Kevin and Analogue are running a business?   It seems that you don't know me very well.

All I'm saying is that we can't assume it will get the same cores when there could be a reason why they wouldn't. I didn't say that they wouldn't or even say that they probably wouldn't. I still think that they probably WILL give us all the cores. It's a huge leap to go from "I think they probably will but might not because [possible reasons]" to "I'll bet money against you that they won't," so it's safe to say that you've mischaracterized what I'm saying. Again, we don't even know if Kevtris gets paid for each unit produced which is another thing I would not assume.

I'm just reigning in assumptions and helping us form more informed expectations.

Wow this really took off. :-)

As much as I'd like to see Neo-Geo, something tells me that there will be issues since it will need a copy of the BIOS. Granted, anyone could download the free version of the Universe BIOS from the project site, but that's a commercial hack of the original and is not exactly public domain (free version is always one version behind the paid version but BOTH versions are technically illegal).

Analogue already sold custom CMVS Neo-Geo so perhaps they are targeting a similar customer who might already know what the UniBIOS is good for and where to get it. Did their old consolized MVS Neo-Geo board have UniBIOS preinstalled? At least the boards originally included a legitimate copy of the original BIOS.

Note: Shipping charge does not increase when you have a quantity of 2.

I was pretty close to completing my preorder, but I don't see how I'll add the discounted 8bitdo matched controller and receiver. I also don't know if I'll be living at my current address when February comes around.

Dilemma...

The cores allow games to be played off an SD card.  This will not be available in the original firmware.

Some roms are "illegal" to posess depending on timeframe, but so is jaywalking to your mailbox...
 

A large portion of the cores require bios files.  Smoke Monster packs have 'em.  Won't be anything new.
 

So which version did people go for? I went for the North American like release

Same, the NA Classic scheme. Thought about the all black, but that's more Sega Genesis than Super Nintendo.

Now I need to pick up a few good SNES controllers to add to my backups

Clear one > all the others