Your Old 3DS Won't Play SNES Games, Nintendo Explains Why

If you haven't heard the good news, you're finally going to be able to play Super Nintendo games on the go. We've been able to play our old favorites on the Wii and Wii U for a while now, but for some reason Nintendo had neglected to bring those same games to the 3DS. And now we have a good idea of why.

Recently, Nintendo announced that they would be porting over a whole bunch of old Super Nintendo games to the 3DS. There was just one tiny catch, though. The games wouldn't play on just any 3DS out there. Only the New 3DS would be granted access to the classic titles.

Today, Nintendo clarified the reason why your trusty launch 3DS won't work. The New 3DS has a newer, faster CPU that its older brother, which is necessary in order to play the games properly. Older systems wouldn't play the games "with quality results," which is why they opted to not make the feature available on them.

It's kind of fascinating to see a console from 2011 unable to play games from all the way back in 1990/1. Of course, the issue comes with emulating the Super Nintendo and the game on a completely different architecture. So now those with original launch 3DSs have to decide whether or not they want to keep their Ambassador Program games, or have access to SNES titles on their mobile console of choice.

Source: GameInformer