Well that didn't take long! Barely a week out from its official September 29 release date the SNES Classic has been hacked to support user loaded games. The SNES Classic comes pre-installed with 21 amazing games, like the never before released Star Fox 2. It is also missing quite a few classics (Chrono Trigger cough). With Cluster's update to his NES Classic modding tool Hakchi2, all of these missing games can now be added! As with all hacks of this kind, things enter a moral gray area, but with no official way to add games, hacks are bound to happen.
I was curious about the use of Hakchi2; is it hard to use? Would my games even be compatible? Since I currently don't own an SNES Classic, I decided to try it out on my NES Classic. Using my copy of Castlevania III, a game that was surprisingly absent from the NES Classic, I went through the steps. Within a few minutes of dumping my cartridge I was playing Castlevania III on the NES Classic with the built in emulator! What's even better though, is that the system now has a controller combo to go back to the main menu (default select+down)! Hakchi2 also allows the installation of emulators for other systems and for the NES (for games that are not compatible with Nintendo's built in emulator). I wasn't interested in trying out this functionality however.
With how easy it is to use Hakchi2, it is unfortunate that Nintendo didn't give us a way to legitimately add more games to these systems. With roughly 300 megabytes of extra space on the NES/SNES Classic, users could have been able to buy and add hundreds of games to their libraries. Hopefully the success of these "Mini" consoles might encourage Nintendo to try and find a way to make them more expandable in the future.
