Happily, the Super NES Classic Edition appears to be a lot easier to find than its older sibling from last year. While a few online retailers (most notably Amazon) appear to have done their customers wrong with preorder fulfillment, the Super NES mini has shown up at brick-and-mortar retail in far healthier numbers than anyone expected. That's great news for everyone except eBay scalpers (and boo hoo to them anyway).
Yet this is not to say everyone who wants a tiny Super NES has scored. And of course many people find Nintendo's McNugget version of the full-sized Super NES's proverbial chicken sandwich lacking in various respects — most notably in its inability to legitimately support aany games besides the 21 built into the hardware. For those heartbroken or unsatisfied fans, Cyber Gadget has announced a Super NES-specific adaptation of its popular Retro Freak console.
Like the Super NES mini, the Retro Freak is an emulation-based retro gaming solution. While its internals weren't put together by Nintendo, the Retro Freak has a much better reputation for quality than competing emulation and system-on-a-chip boxes like RetroN 5 or something like the retro-bit Generations. The standard Retro Freak supports original cartridges for a huge variety of consoles, including Game Boy Advance and the entire SuperGrafx library (yes, all six games). The Retro Freak Basic, as they're calling the new device, strips things down to strictly the Super NES and its Japanese companion, the Super Famicom. The two formats had roughly similar cartridge shapes with some specific regional tweaks (unlike the considerable physical differences between NES and Famicom cartridges), and the Basic supports both.
The Super NES cartridge slot actually takes the form of a plug-in adapter for a tiny core unit, which suggests Cyber Gadget will be selling this as a modular platform that will allow players to pick and choose adapters for the specific platforms they want to use — while will likely turn out to be a more expensive prospect if you were to buy all adapters versus simply picking up the original Retro Freak, while alternately offering a less expensive solution than the standard console for those who want to focus exclusively on a single platform or two.
Cyber Gadget doesn't appear to have announced a price or release date for the Basic, but it might be worth considering as a more expansive alternative to the Mini. I'll be pitting the original Retro Freak against alternate solutions like the Super NES mini, Analogue Nt, and Retro USB AVS in a feature later this month for those curious to see how its emulation holds up against the competition… and whether or not they should bother with the Basic version.
Source: Japanese Nintendo via Nintendo Life