The SNES Classic Edition has been released for fewer than 24 hours, and fans have already been able to extract the Star Fox 2 ROM from the system and release it online. Buying an $80 piece of hardware from Nintendo will no longer be required to play the previously unreleased game, although downloading the game in this manner is legally complicated.

One individual was even reportedly able to get the game running on actual Super Nintendo hardware.

To answer questions about the setup: It's the dev cart I posted earlier. I flashed a 27c160 EPROM with the rom extracted from a SNES Classic. That's a RGB modded SNES Jr hooked up to a framemeister via RGB, hence the HD. If you didn't see the other post, here's what the dev cart board looks like: https://imgur.com/a/MPpzW It's a SuperFX 2 dev cart. Here's a video of someone else's of it running, in his case a SuperFX 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnxxu2lEC_I I'm not going to share the rom, I just wanted to give the good news that it does run.

Here’s a video of the game running on non-SNES Classic hardware:

The Star Fox 2 ROM itself has made it online, however, and players have reported that it works well with existing emulation programs.

The SNES Classic Edition looks like it will be just as easily hacked as the NES Classic Edition, although no reports of fans being able to add more games to the hardware have surfaced online. The SNES and NES Classic Edition both use the same internal hardware, allowing the previously released hacking tools to have limited access to the system at launch.

So a piece of history has made it into the great wide world, and it’s unlikely this will do much to hurt the sales of the SNES Classic Edition. This puts the ROM’s availability into a weird ethical and legal area, although Nintendo completists are likely just happy to have the game widely available.