Haven't tried it, but I imagine it will be very similar to last year's NES Classic Mini. I'm a sucker for real hardware and if I have to resort to emulation, I have better ways of doing so, so this release is not really all that interesting to me.

What is of interest is the fact that they are releasing Star Fox 2 for the first time and from the looks of it, it looks like they did a lot of work. A version of Star Fox 2 had been leaked in the past and while it is very playable, we know for certain that there are features missing. The version being released now looks to be close to final if not final build 😀. So yeah, I'm very excited about that, here's hoping next year we see a N64 Mini Classic with better controllers and a version of Dinosaur Planet or Mother 3 😁.

F2bnp wrote:

Haven't tried it, but I imagine it will be very similar to last year's NES Classic Mini. I'm a sucker for real hardware and if I have to resort to emulation, I have better ways of doing so, so this release is not really all that interesting to me.

What is of interest is the fact that they are releasing Star Fox 2 for the first time and from the looks of it, it looks like they did a lot of work. A version of Star Fox 2 had been leaked in the past and while it is very playable, we know for certain that there are features missing. The version being released now looks to be close to final if not final build 😀. So yeah, I'm very excited about that, here's hoping next year we see a N64 Mini Classic with better controllers and a version of Dinosaur Planet or Mother 3 😁.

From online reviews some says the internal hw should be the same of the NES Mini and it seems obvious cause a Quad ARMv7 processor should be much more than enough fast for these emulations even if someone would say that perfect accuracy need -much- more if we consider every games compatibility, but in this case, as usual for this type of plug & play tv devices, only some selected and tested games are inside. For the people that maybe will test it,it would be interesting to know how much technically accurated is the emulation compared to snes9x or these high end emulators.
Personally as you said I'm more fan of the real hardware and real games cartridges cause I'm sensible to original sound,video and input latency. Also with its original problems, defects or bugs.
Beside having preferred a real hardware low level implementation, one thing I've read from some reviews that I don't understand is that in games where there was a full screen white flashing video effect, this seems to be not present in the games inside the Mini. I don't understand if they intentionally decided for this (maybe for people having eyes related problems?) or is an emulation bug.

I've read about the Star Fox 2 story and it's great to see a final never released game that would have pushed the whole system to its limit. Personally I'd have loved to see also Final Fight and Doom into it!

I want one 🙁

Where to buy?

I had the NES version briefly but sold it on in quick time - sound emulation was awful, controller cord way too short, and the game selection wasn't great.

What i'll say though, is that if you see a Pi evangelist touting how better the Pi is at the same job in any comments section about the Snes Mini, just ignore them. The input latency the Pi has works highly against it and it doesn't fare well with heat and the updates are sporadic (And quite regressive at times, like Stretch breaking the GL driver leaving only software rasterizing at best - unannounced)

Seems like a nice novelty item, just like the NES Classic Mini. But if I wanted to play SFC/SNES games, I'd sooner pick an (undoubtedly much more accurate) emulator on PC, or the real thing. (My house doesn't even have any HDMI-equipped monitors, as amazing as that may sound...)

Someone will probably (maybe even already has?) pull that updated Star Fox 2 ROM off the internal flash memory and distribute it, too, which gets rid of the exclusivity factor that that one game provided.

leileilol wrote:

What i'll say though, is that if you see a Pi evangelist touting how better the Pi is at the same job in any comments section about the Snes Mini, just ignore them. The input latency the Pi has works highly against it and it doesn't fare well with heat and the updates are sporadic (And quite regressive at times, like Stretch breaking the GL driver leaving only software rasterizing at best - unannounced)

Exactly right. Input lag is definetly not something you want to worry about when play old retro games where timing is everything. I'll admit, I do have a NES mini and as of this morning, a SNES mini but I still use the original hardware to play games. I suppose the real culprit though is the screen in which we play it on. I still use a Sony Trinitron CRT tv.

Raspberry Pi is better. 😏

badmojo wrote:

I had the NES version briefly but sold it on in quick time - sound emulation was awful, controller cord way too short, and the game selection wasn't great.

I knew about the controller cord but I didn't know about sound emulation problems? Can you explain more?
About the Rasperry PI, I had some models and they're great if we consider the price, the os and continous updates, but using them as desktop pc replacement I'd need much more cpu power. Obviously it's not possible to expect a lot from 5W at the plug.
For console emulation there're some few accurated emulators for some console but I still prefer original hardware. In the case of the SNES Mini being an official console I hope the accuracy will be perfect but I wait info from who got one.

386SX wrote:

I knew about the controller cord but I didn't know about sound emulation problems? Can you explain more?

All I know was that it blew chunks, but here's a more thoughtful and helpful rundown of the issues:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com.au/2016/1 … es-classic.html

badmojo wrote:

386SX wrote:

I knew about the controller cord but I didn't know about sound emulation problems? Can you explain more?

All I know was that it blew chunks, but here's a more thoughtful and helpful rundown of the issues:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com.au/2016/1 … es-classic.html

I understand. I just hope that, like for the longer gamepad cord on the SNES Mini, they read about people opinions and improved it for this second version being more oriented to the public than the first NES Mini that I still have not seen on shops.
But maybe we usually have much expectation on a product that is out there just for a sort of "free time project" when even main consoles often has many problems at launch.

About the lenght of the controller cable of the NES Mini..
There were rumors that the manufacturing company confused the metric system and imperial units.

In Europe, the typical NES controller cable was about 1.8 meters long (180cm or ~6 feet).
If you made it 1.8 feet long instead, you would get about 0.55 meters, which is close to the NES Mini cable (0.55m or 0.76m).

Or if you took the Famicoms rather short ~90cm cable (3 feet) and made it 90inches long, you'll get 2.28m (or 7.5 feet).
That's about the same size as the North American NES cable, which is said to be 91.5 inches long (7.6 feet).

Well, at least I think so. It wasn't easy to find out about the cable lenghts, because they seem to vary (US vs EU).

Anyway, I have no solid proof for this.
Perhaps they just used magic numbers and this is pure coincidence.
It is an interesting idea, however. ^^

Well I got around to testing the SNES mini last night. Played through some levels of Super Castlevania 4 and Contra 3. Aspect ratio is fine and not stretched on default settings, colours look fantastic, sound is great and lag is almost non existent. I'd say that they've hit gold with this console and I'm quite happy with it. When I had a Raspberry Pi hooked up to the same Sony Bravia tv there was lag so Nintendo's hardware has compensated for this. This is coming from a guy who collects Nes and Snes games so im comparing directly with real hardware.

Now to wait for a hakchi update so I can upload the full collection of snes games onto it. Apparently there's still minor issues with the latest version of hakchi when it comes to using it on a SNES mini. Works great on my NES mini though.

Long time no see borgie! Glad to hear the SNES version is a winner.

badmojo wrote:

Long time no see borgie! Glad to hear the SNES version is a winner.

Hey mate! Yes it has been. Good to see you're still around and I hope you've been well 😀

Yeah it's a winner in my books. Still have an attachment to the original hardware though just like most vogoners. Getting so hard to collect as of late with the constant rising prices of games. I'm paying an average of $40-$50 AU for good condition PAL games. Then the rarer games average between $80-$200 each. Castlevania 3 for the NES cost me $250. Very hard to find in PAL A.

borgie83 wrote:

Well I got around to testing the SNES mini last night. Played through some levels of Super Castlevania 4 and Contra 3. Aspect ratio is fine and not stretched on default settings, colours look fantastic, sound is great and lag is almost non existent. I'd say that they've hit gold with this console and I'm quite happy with it. When I had a Raspberry Pi hooked up to the same Sony Bravia tv there was lag so Nintendo's hardware has compensated for this. This is coming from a guy who collects Nes and Snes games so im comparing directly with real hardware.

I'd like to know if there's a full screen white flashing video effect on some game and what do you think about it.

I haven't experienced any flashing effects at all. What games is this occurring on for you and what tv are you using?

Here's a couple of photos;

borgie83 wrote:

I haven't experienced any flashing effects at all. What games is this occurring on for you and what tv are you using?

Here's a couple of photos;

I dont' have it yet but from some reviews it would seems but not sure that this particular effect was not originally intended to be there in the some games but in the Mini.
I read it here for example http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/hard … ink_to_the_past
where they wrote:

"Yoshi's Island on level 1-7, where hitting a 'Fuzzy' cloud causes the screen to flash white briefly – something that doesn't occur on original hardware."

Finally they did a deep review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOObbaqOaUQ