A little more about the SNES Mini including my experiances hacking it.

OK so once again I am back here talking about the Super NES Classic Edition or the
Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Famicom as the Japanese version is known,  so with the amount I have gassed on and on about it why am I talking about it again? Well basically because it has been hacked.

Yes hackers have already worked out how to get into the SNES classic and not only take out the Star Fox 2 Rom so it can be put onto a cart/flash cart and played on a real snes but well they have worked out how you can put more games onto the Mini Snes and whats more it is pretty darn simple really.

I am not going to go into how to hack the SNES mini if you want to find out then that information is pretty readily available online and only a search away, nor am I going to be harping on and on about the issue of piracy and if and when it is wrong or right. What I want to talk about are my experiences of playing around with my own machine. Now just to put some of those to rest who might read this and cry oh no he is stealing games its so unfair to Nintendo its not fair to poor old Nintendo lets just get this straight I own like 250 physical SNES games, plus I have a bunch of them legally purchased through the Virtual Console on various devices so they have had a lot of money from me and I'm not about to stop buying things now just because I have found a toy to play around with. Plus lets be honest when Nintendo purposely push something get it popular and then make hardly any of them allowing the market to be controlled by scalpers, while also refusing to print more or do anything about the situation and therefore shunning legitimate customers who actually want to buy there products desperatly but cant I take the view that if Nintendo doesn't give a shit about its fan base then why should we give a shit about them? I actually hope some Chinese company makes a knock off lookey likey version of the SNES mini which is good enough to pass for a real one and charges less than Nintendo and makes more units and creams a healthy profit off of this situation, at least this would actually see a larger number of happy consumers. OK so now I have got that out of the way lets get back to business.

So as I have previously said every version of the SNES mini will contain the  following 16 games:

Contra III: The Alien Wars

Donkey Kong Country

Final Fantasy III

F-ZERO

Kirby Super Star

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Mega Man X

Secret of Mana

Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts

Super Mario Kart

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

Super Mario World

Super Metroid

Star Fox

Star Fox 2

Yoshi’s Island

Which is a pretty darn fine list of games as far as I am concerned.

In Europe we also got

EarthBound,
Kirby's Dream Course
Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Super Castlevania IV
Super Punch-Out!!

So that's 21 games. So I guess one thing people are wondering is if the machine comes loaded with 21 how many would actually fit onto it? Well that's not a question that can be easily answered basically because different games take up different amounts of room. Apparently the mini Snes has 249.8mb of room on it. I cant remember how much room the original 21 actually took up but mine currently has 72 games on it and that's only taken up 136mb so as you can see you can probably lift the number of games up to 100 and still have plenty of room for saves and save states.

So when I flashed mine I started plain and simple by adding two of the games Japan got on there mini Snes that we didn't get. I added The Legend of the Mystical Ninja and Super Soccer

  I might have added Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers but apparently some people had found issues with adding this game and it not playing properly so I thought for now I wouldn't worry about it. From there I went on to add 3 of the games I said I felt were missing from the unit in an earlier post, I added Actraiser, Sim City and Final Fight 2. I then tested the unit out and well all of them worked.

This is when I decided to get a little bit experimental and try a few Japanese games which had translation patches put on them, this I figured would be great as I could then play games that never came out here and it would be pretty close to playing them on real hardware. I added Super Back to the Future 2, Super Robot Wars 3, and a whole host of other things. Every now and then I would find that a certain game wouldn't work for example I tried to put the hack Oh No More Zombies Ate my Neighbours on and that didn't work. I am aware that I could instead of depending on the emulator built into the SNES mini install a program called Retroarch on it and this would increase the amount of games that work but as it stands I wanted to keep things nice and simple. In honesty once you get used to it its very easy to put more games on and take other games off. As I have said I am not going to go into detail when it comes to how to hack it, but I found it rather easy once I had read some simple instructions, basically you get this programme that does 95% of the work for you all you need is the roms and a little bit of patience and thought.

So do I see this as a SNES replacement? Not at all. I am still very happy that I have my SNES and I have also asked my girlfriend for a Snes Evedrive for Christmas so I can play translations and hacks on the real machine but I do find the mini Snes to be an interesting bit of kit which I would recommend if you can get yours hands on it for around its retail price. I also would have to recommend hacking it sure you dint have to go wild and become some kind of super eye patch wearing pirate you might just put the snes games you own yourself on it or try out things that simply are not available for sale over here and never have been, for me its all about opening new doors, experiencing new things.

I have seen some people complaining that we didn't get the Pal versions of games or that the box art you see in the menu screen on the Snes mini is not the Pal box art or that the games on the machine are more what was popular in America instead of the UK basically that there is nothing on there like Plok or Cannon Fodder or anything basically British. Well you need to remember that there wasn't a UK version of the SNES mini there was a European version and diffrent games would have been popular in different parts of Europe. In all honesty though I don't see any of these things as an issue a lot of the British Games are not exactly expensive, I grabbed a cart only copy of Plok recently for £5, that's not going to happen with Super Mario RPG is it? The roms used on the SNES Mini are the American ones and there running at 60hz, there trying to give us the best experience we can have now instead of giving us the crippled old 50hz we used to have to put up with and that's why we have the American boxes. In honesty having the American versions really helped us when it came to Contra 3, did we really want the old robot censored European Probotector? Yes I would have liked the option to play at 50hz and 60hz, to have played the pal and NTSC versions side by side, to have more case art options and digital manuals on the system but I don't think any of this is a gamebreaker so to speak and I do think some people have been absolute wingers about it especially when other people cant even get the bloody machines for love nor money.

So to end if you have a SNES mini I hope your enjoying it weather your just playing it or messing around with it and trying to add stuff to it, and if you cant get one then best of luck to you... Finally to Nintendo...sort your bloody act out for once.