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Super Nintendo Classic Coming in September (hollywoodreporter.com)
Rumors are true. Nintendo is gearing up to launch the SNES Classic, a miniaturized version of the glorious original Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The console will include 21 games when it launches September 29. A report adds: Among the big surprises: a never-before released Star Fox 2 is in the mix. Here's the full list of games: Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, F-Zero, Super Metroid, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super Punch Out, Super Castlevania IV, Donkey Kong Country, Mega Man X, Kirby Super Star, Final Fantasy III, Kirby's Dream Course, Star Fox, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Contra III: The Alien Wars, Secret of Mana, EarthBound, and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. It will retail at a price point of $80.
They went to 11 for that games list!
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But i'm going to hold out for the N64 Classic.
...51 people will actually be able to get one, instead of the 50 that were able to get an NES Classic.
Not holding my breath.
Nice games list, but will they make enough to come close to demand?
Considering how things played out last time with the NES Classic, I'm not holding my breath that this will ever truly become "available" to the masses for the $79.99 price mentioned in the article (and not in the summary).
A few years ago I was thinking about building an arcade cabinet. Even found working copies of several thousand old ROMs including all the classics that I plugged an uncountable number of quarters into. I could invest a couple of hours into getting all of that working on the machine connected to my TV and still be ahead of the $200-$300 a NES Classic, plus whatever $$$ this new SNES Classic will end up costing. And still play all of the games included in both the NES and SNES Classic's.
Nintendo should be manufacturing additional NES Classic units instead of shutting their production down (Which has already occurred) and then announcing a Super Nintendo Classic. They haven't remotely met demand for the first retro console yet. Many of us were looking forward to it from the second it was announced, but there were no pre-orders available online, so we waited, and tried to buy it release day, and it sold out instantly. Several "click-a-thons" were announced by Amazon, Walmart.com, etc. that involved everyone getting online at, say, 5pm on a Tuesday and trying to buy a limited supply, which crashed their severs and left people hitting reload for a half hour in a row a half dozen or a dozen days of this, and not getting the product.
Some people who were trying to get it from the beginning STILL don't have the product like a year after it was announced and 8 months or so after it came out. Ebay prices are sky-high for a $60 retail console.
Nintendo should meet demand and make sure all the people who were ready to buy an NES Classic before or on release day get the opportunity to buy a new one at the retail price before moving on to the next thing.
I've pretty much vowed not to consider getting a Nintendo Switch, a Super Nintendo Classic, pay for the Mario smartphone game, or in any way contribute to funding anything Nintendo until they provide what they hyped up and then never made available to me in the most annoying way possible- a way that took a ton of time and was very frustrating. No NES Classic, no me buying Nintendo products going forward. I don't like the way they do business.
to keep the scalpers at bay. It's going to sell for 3x the asking price, meaning a scalper could buy 3, sit on 1 and sell two and make a nice profit. I could do a little more math and tell you how many they could sit on and still do well. Basically, these would have to be so common that the scalpers can't keep up.
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Hope they make the controller cords longer this time!
No Chrono Trigger??
Also, why not complete series like Mega Man X, X2, X3 and Donkey Kong Country 1, 2 and 3? The other two Final Fantasy would have been great too.
Elok
You don't need to say "price point," you can just say "price." It means the same.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The fun part about RetroPie is it automagically detects controllers on startup. Check out the Controllers section of their docs to see common examples.
I tend to leave my Pi on, so I have a few wired 360 controllers attached to it (power-a xbox 360 controllers, if you're curious). I find they work pretty well for NES, SNES, PS1, and Genesis (with minor remapping) games, and they are ergonomic enough that I don't get X-Box claw or any other hand cramps. They don't have quite the same feel as original controllers, but I find I'm able to do stuff like the Mock Ball and other timing-dependent tricks just fine. Of course, you could also just find some original controllers and get a USB adapter.
What point are you trying to make? Old games had to fit on small media, this is not news.
While I agree that a Raspberry Pi isn't "far cheaper" than this SNES Classic, your pricing is a bit too high. I just bought a RPi 3 kit with a case, AC adapter, HDMI cable, and 8 GB SD card for $65 at MicroCenter.
Why have just Super Mario World when you can have Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World
The answer to this is obvious. They've decided how many games they want on it at this price. If they add too many, no one will buy them on Virtual Console. The number of cartridges is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if they have 21 or 22 "cartridges". They likely have the exact same hardware in this as the NES classic*, and that had room for literally hundreds of games, not just the 30 included. They don't want to reduce the perceived value of their games by making them too cheap. Indeed, if they wanted to include Super Mario All-Stars, they would have included it as a separate "cartridge", so the marketing could increase the game count. They actually did this for the NES Classic with Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. They could have combined them into the Donkey Kong Classics "cartridge" (also released for the NES as a combined cartridge), but why would they. They can include as many completely Nintendo owned games as they want at zero cost to them. The opportunity cost in other sales and perceived value, however, stops them from doing so.
*Which hopefully explains why they discontinued that one...every additional NES Classic they produced would've meant exactly one less SNES Classic produced. They are likely identical with a different plastic shell, as the NES Classic hardware is perfectly capable of playing SNES games. The controllers are likely using the exact same board as the NES classic controller (which is actually just a Wii Classic Controller board) as well. This was the reason they discontinued the NES Classic, they wanted to produce these instead. They might go back to the NES if the SNES sales were to ever slow, just needing to use the other plastic parts and box. The electronics would be identical and require no production changes.
I bought a $20-25 Logitech controller. Has two sticks, takes some playing around to get used to. I've seen USB N64 controller clones on Amazon, but they get mixed reviews. I can attest to some of them being cheap after having both a USB NES and SNES controller - shitty quality. Again, N64 games are hit and miss on it: Star Fox, Super Smash Bros work well; Golden Eye barely works; Star Wars Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron do not work. If you really want N64, you can find decent N64 bundles on eBay for about what you could build the Raspi for.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I believe this is due to nowadays better hardware performances. Back then, games had often to be optimized in plain assembly and took longer to develop.
Nowadays, more high level languages and reusable libraries can be used and there is no problems deploying 200MB games on computers.
Back then, most games were work of art optimized in every part of it. Today, games are optimized just enough to run on the available hardware.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.