The NES Classics hardware is such massive overkill for NES emulation that I suspect they designed the platform to be reused in a future SNES Classic.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/11/04/nes-classic-more-pow...

Interesting. I knew it would be good enough to do SNES games but I am quite surprised it is actually more powerful than the 3DS and Wii. Then again the Wii is 10 years old so yeah it makes sense. Wow that 10 years went fast.

There can be a lot of emulation overhead, depending on how the emulation is done. So the fact that the hardware is more powerful than the Wii doesn't mean you could successfully do a high-fidelity Wii emulator on it.

It was only relatively recently that you could run a high-fidelity (bit-perfect, cycle-by-cycle actual emulation of the underlying hardware) emulator of an N64 on a PC. E.g. Project64 required a Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM and a GeForce 9000 in order to emulate a 94MHz R4300i and its vector coprocessor. (And I'm not sure how many shortcuts Project64 takes.)

Anyway, it might be that the hardware is overkill because they want to use it for other platforms, or it could just be that they're doing very high-fidelity emulation and are just beating the performance problems into submission with transistors.

This thing has better hardware specs than the 3DS and the Wii. It'd be nice if this sold well and they then offered a SNES controller + games, then N64, and so on, so the only games it can't run are on the Wii U or Switch. (Edit: beaten to it.. ah well.)

Fwiw, if you buy a Wii for $50 at GameStop, you can connect to the internet over wifi and buy many NES, SNES, GameCube, and N64 games for it and play them natively on the Wii. Here are some games we downloaded for our kids and all play together:

    Super Metroid
    Super Mario 1
    Super Mario 2
    Super Mario 3
    Super Mario RPG
    Super Mario World
    Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
    Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
    Sonic 3
    Kirby's Dreamland 3

Yeah I have a handful for my favourite SNES games from the Wii Virtual Console. But my Wii has long been retired to a storage cupboard. Plus I would like a proper SNES controller for that authentic feel :) I keep thinking about doing a RetroPi and get a USB SNES controller but it isn't a priority for me really. Would be nice to be able to support Nintendo with a £50 SNES Classic next year though!

You can get a SNES to USB adapter on Amazon/eBay for not much, plug and play pretty much, just need to map it to your emulator.

You can't beat the feel of a genuine, 20 year old controller!

They also make them for pretty much every controller you could want - Even Wiiport to USB which means you could plug these NES Classic controllers into the PC to use with emulators directly.

I wish these all worked with Steam Link though :(

I wanted this for Christmas.

Every supplier in my area has sold out multiple times already.

It'd be neat to see emulators of this quality on the Switch, which looks like it's going to be a fantastic console. OTOH, quite a bit more expensive for the consumer!