SNES Classic Edition Hack Opens The Door To More Games

We all knew this day was coming, though some of us may not have expected it to come so soon. The SNES Classic Edition has been hacked, allowing those who are lucky enough to have one do all sorts of things with the mini console. Obviously, the motivation behind hacking the SNES Classic will be adding new games for many people, thereby solving one of the biggest gripes many of us have with the SNES Classic.

Since adding new games will rely on downloading ROMs and loading them onto your SNES Classic, we're operating within something of a morally gray area here. Still, given the speed in which the NES Classic was hacked to do the exact same thing, even Nintendo must have known this would happen. After all, the hardware within the SNES Classic is largely the same as the NES Classic, making the process of hacking even easier.

Those hardware similarities also mean that you can hack the SNES Classic with existing tools. An update pushed to ClusterM's hakchi2 tool over the weekend makes it compatible with the SNES Classic Edition, which means you can now use the tool to hack both it and the NES Classic Edition. It even supports automatic ROM conversion to the SNES Classic's format, and ClusterM says that currently, about 75% of SNES games are confirmed to work with hakchi2.

Some of those SNES games could prove to be a bit difficult, though, as they had onboard chips that might be a challenge for SNES Classic emulation. For those games, you can also use the RetroArch mod, so if there's one game in particular you'd like to play on your SNES Classic, you should be able to get it up and running one way or another.

So, there you have it – if you were left wondering why some of your favorite SNES games were missing from the Classic, you can now add them. A thread over at NeoGAF breaks down the process of hacking and modding the SNES Classic, but obviously, proceed at your own risk. Consider your decision to hack your SNES Classic carefully, because if you end up bricking your console, it's going to be difficult to get a new one.