The Super Nintendo Entertainment System: SNES Classic Edition has been available to the general public for less than a day, but tech-savvy players have wasted no time in ripping the system’s most coveted game and releasing it online. A ROM for Star Fox 2 has been shared by hackers, and it appears that one person even managed to get the game working on an original Super Nintendo system.
YouTube videos show the SNES Classic game running on PC hardware, fully playable for those who don’t have the device. The title screen on the game is different from the one seen in previous ROMs, as those were based on an unfinished build of the game before it was canceled in 1995.
As spotted by Polygon, one user has already made a reproduction Super Nintendo cartridge and got the game working on his second-model Super Nintendo system, which features a slightly smaller design than the original console. The cartridge used is a SuperFX 2 development card, necessary for the game’s more strenuous processing.
The process of extracting the Star Fox 2 ROM was likely sped up because the SNES Classic uses the exact same internal hardware as the NES Classic — only the shell and the software are different. As popular games such as Chrono Trigger and the Donkey Kong Country sequels were left off the device, fans will undoubtedly load up their systems with the omissions before too long.
The original NES Classic was cracked almost immediately and players discovered it had enough built-in storage space to hold every game ever released for the system. Downloading these games is, of course, totally illegal without owning a genuine copy already, and the legality of doing even that is nebulous. Nintendo has asserted for years on its website that these “second copy” situations still violate copyright law.
While the novelty of playing a canceled game on your old Super Nintendo is appealing, there are plenty of other, better games on the SNES Classic, from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past to Super Castlevania IV, nearly all of them are worth your time, and with two controllers in the box, you can have a friend join in on the fun.
