It Finally Happened: The NES Classic Has Been Hacked
The fact that the NES Classic only comes with 30 games — no more, no less, for eternity — hasn’t stopped the little thing from burning up the sales charts and being impossible to find. But it was an annoyance mentioned by many gamers when the Classic was announced. How could Nintendo pass up the revenue from letting us buy additional games and downloading them as DLC content? It would be a no-brainer for anyone but this company.
Demand finds a way, and we figured the NES Classic would eventually be hacked into doing what people wanted it to do. As of this weekend, it’s happened. Modders in Japan and Russia have cracked the code and successfully loaded additional games onto the Classic’s menu. And since Nintendo provided no method of Internet connection for the Classic, this is not a weakness they can patch out. The NES Classic has been broken open for good.
So should you mess with it? We would say “wait” on that one. The current method of jailbreaking the NES Classic is highly risky and too easy to screw up. It involves transferring the Classic’s internal data to a computer hard drive and carefully editing the code while adding additional files. One tiny mistake and your miniconsole is bricked (good luck finding another). Over time, we expect the kinks to be ironed out and, eventually, much simpler methods of breaking the NES Classic will be introduced.
As it is, the hacking of the NES Classic is still a work in progress. We don’t know yet if every NES game will run on the system, or if there’s enough internal storage space for that. It is pretty sweet to see Battletoads displayed on that menu, though.
Ammyfan
January 7, 2017 @ 7:29 pm
I'm surprised Nintendo didn't hard code the games to the chip like the Sega classics thing that came out a few years back. The hack might not be worth applying yet, but I suspect they will continue to develop it into something easier to install. If they can get an emulator onto it, ROMs for games – either classics or even brand new games – would be easy enough to create and install.
After all look at the Dreamcast. It may have been jailbroken after production ceased but the latest fan made games are still coming out!
TheKnight
January 8, 2017 @ 11:10 am
Hehe, ''Battletoads.'' The ultimate order sales for every company anywhere. It's too bad they never have it at the 99 cents store. Jokes aside, you can expect people to jump into this and try to hack it themselves and they might even be able to do more things than what those people did.