Well, we all knew this was an inevitbility – A little while ago the NES Classic Edition got hacked, apparently, and the group behind such was able to add in around 60 games, or so I understand. Well, this past week that number grew to, oh, about 700.
This basically covers the entire NES library, and I would also imagine homebrew releases / prototypes, save for games that use special hardware, like the Zapper, or some unique memory mapping chips. Otherwise, barring what looks to be a 512 megabyte storage limit, you can throw pretty much whatever you want on there, up to virtually the entire NES romset.
You could always mod the Wii to do the same kind of thing, and those are a dime a dozen, but don’t do HDMI.
Now, I’m not supporting NES game piracy or anything, but for the hobbyist who already has this kind of data, well, it might be fun to play around with for the sake of learning how the console works, or maybe creating a “custom” set of your favorite games, or even just tweak the NES Classic to have a bit more of a complete experience – at this stage it’s pretty much whatever.
The irony though is still that anyone with a decent laptop could just load the roms onto it, get a decent emulator, and hook it up to their TV via HDMI and be off and running with every game ever, but I guess the idea here is just the principle of being able to actually do this with the NES Classic, if you want. It’s a fun option, anyway.
Below are a few videos detailing how to do this. I can’t seem to find too straightforward of one that isn’t 15 minutes of annoying side commentary, but these do explain how to do the process, so, if you do have one, and try to mod it, have fun.
By the way, quit calling it the NES MIni.