These days, breaking a videogame system is less of an accomplishment and more of an inevitability. Not far into its release at all, Nintendo’s new nostalgia machine, the SNES Classic, has already been cracked. Russian hacker Alexey “ClusterM” Avdyukhin has updated his Windows program “hakchi2,” which previously allowed users to add more games to the NES Classic—the program now supports the SNES Classic.
ClusterM touted the new updates through his GitHub page:
*SNES Classic Mini support.
*Automatic ROM conversion to special SNES Classic Mini’s format. ~75% of games are working fine. You can use RetroArch mod for problem games.
*For expert users: you can select SNES game and press Ctrl+Alt+E to show hidden Preset ID editor.
*Individual profiles for different consoles, so you can use the same hakchi2 for both NES, SNES, Famicom and Super Famicom. You can select console type using “Settings menu”.
*7-Zip compression support for all platforms and emulators. You can compress or decompress any game using only one checkbox.
*Group operations. Now you can select multiple games in the main window, right click on them and do mass compression or mass cover downloading only for selected games. Hold control to select individual games.
*For expert users: NAND dump, NAND-B dump and memboot features. Don’t use it if you don’t known what is it.
*Some bugfixes and refactoring.
This exploit will not only allow for users to add new games, but also allows new features such as changing the background image in the UI, or tweaking the video filters that the SNES Classic provides. A community devoted to SNES Classic modifications has already started up on Reddit. The exploit at its current state isn’t perfect; however, a user compiled a list of SNES games that present a bit of trouble when one attempts to add them to the SNES Classic.
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry found during a teardown that the SNES Classic uses the same guts as the NES Classic, making the prospect of hacking the latter system quite easy. Check out our ranked list of all SNES Classic games right here.