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There have been plenty of other "clone" consoles designed to let you play Super NES cartridges on more modern displays, but they all rely on software-based emulation or knock-off chips. That means they're not always compatible with every game made for the original Super NES, and such consoles can make some games susceptible to glitchy or inaccurate sound and graphics (absolutely perfect SNES emulation is a surprisingly difficult lift ). The Super Nt, on the other hand, runs off an Altera Cyclone V FPGA , which directly simulates the circuitry found in the original hardware for improved compatibility and accuracy. The Analogue team says it spent "thousands of hours" engineering the FPGA to be "free of compromises" for 16-bit gameplay.

Using an FPGA also means the Super Nt could be used for more than just Super NES games. That was the case with Analogue's previous release, the FPGA-based Nt Mini , after a semi-official jailbreak let the system run Game Boy, Game Gear, Colecovision, and other classic game ROMS via a built-in SD card slot (as well as NES ROMs, which can be copied directly from cartridges). We can only assume similar hacks will be in store for the Super Nt, which also sports an SD card slot for "firmware updates."

The Super Nt's plastic body (which comes in four colors) isn't quite as fetching as the heavy, high-grade aluminum in Analogue's previous releases, but it's probably a fair trade to knock a few hundred dollars off the asking price. Given the high quality of previous Analogue releases, we'd say gamers looking for something a bit more backward-compatible than Nintendo's own Super NES Classic Edition should keep an eye out for the Super Nt's "Super Soon" planned release in February 2018.