SNES Classic uses the exact same hardware as NES Classic

The lovely tech obsessives over at Eurogamer and Digital Foundry have gotten their hands on a Super Nintendo Classic Edition, and of course they cracked that sucker open to take a look at its internals. Their findings? The SNES Classic uses the exact same mainboard and chips as last year's NES Classic.

It's the exact same board. It's been trimmed a bit around the corners, but it's using the exact same Allwinner R16 SoC, 256MB DDR3 RAM chip, and has the same 512MB of NAND storage, which is plenty of space for the paltry 21 SNES roms on the retro console. This makes sense, as clever hackers were able to get the NES Classic running all sorts of ROMs and homebrew apps, so the hardware is certainly capable of playing more than just NES or even SNES games. The magic, of course, is in Nintendo's custom emulation layer, which is superbly crafted.

However this makes it even more puzzling as to why the NES and SNES Classic are so scarce. It's literally an off-the-shelf low cost chipset in a cute retro case with a couple of rejiggered Wii classic controllers. None of those parts are in low supply or difficult to manufacture. Nintendo could turn out a bajillion of these things and meet all of the crazy consumer demand. Instead they left heaps of money on the table last year and opened up the door for opportunistic Ebay scalpers, and if the preorder nightmare is anything to go by, the exact same fiasco will play out again this year with the SNES Classic.

It's a confusing and disheartening turn of events, but hopefully Nintendo does better at meeting demand when the SNES Classic arrives tomorrow. One thing is for sure: Nintendo is giving the Raspberry Pi Foundation a lot of strong business.