The SNES Classic Edition Looks To Be Quite Hackable

When the NES Classic Edition came out last year, a few people that got their hands on the hardware found a fun little secret about it – it's quite hackable. In fact, many were able to get the system to run every single NES game in existence, as well as a few Famicom games for good measure. So, of course, the hot question is if the SNES Classic Edition will be capable of the same treatment when it arrives this Friday.

Thus far, all signs point to yet. Digital Foundry managed to get its hands on a system before its release, and actually took a look at the boards that were inside, comparing them to the same boards that came with the NES Classic Edition. And it made a nice little discovery in the process – the boards are the exact same. You can see the two cards below if you want to glance at how similar they are.

This isn't really a shock, as it appears that both systems seem to be running off the same emulators to get the games going on their specific hardware.

According to this report from Eurogamer, "the corners - carved out to fit within the NES mini shell - remain the same on the SNES model, even though there is no real need for them to be touched at all. As a result, the new piece of hardware looks slightly less elegant internally. Hardware-wise, we're looking at the same off-the-shelf Allwinner R16 SoC (system on chip), featuring four ARM Cortex A7s paired with an ARM Mali 400 MP2 GPU. Hynix provides the single memory chip - a 256MB DDR3 module - and there's a generous 512MB of NAND storage."

That's a lot of technical jargon, but in other words, hackers should have no trouble getting into the system's hardware and figuring out a way to get more SNES classic games running on it. That includes favorites like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time, Sunset Riders and maybe even Chrono Trigger, if they can get the job done. We'll let you know what the teams out there are able to execute.

The SNES Classic Edition hits stores this Friday!