The greatest hope of retro gamers and the greatest fear of Nintendo have been met simultaneously: The immensely popular NES Classic Edition has been hacked and its 30-game library augmented with new and even homebrewed titles.
Hacking has been ongoing since the release of the device, but this is the most promising development yet, and it appears to work on the US version of the tiny console.
It must be said that this is not a simple process \u2014 not yet, at least. It involves booting the Linux-based NES into FEL mode, hacking the kernel, and injecting ROM files using a special tool. A GUI has already been created to make things easier and tutorials are being made , but we warn readers not to attempt this unless they know about things like MD5 hashes and config files. Bricking your device with a single wrong click is definitely a possibility.
So far a limited number of games have been checked with the device, and there\u2019s no guarantee that any particular one will work \u2014 the emulator software built into the NES Classic Edition wouldn\u2019t have been tested with, for instance, Blaster Master, since it wasn\u2019t one of the games intended for inclusion. It might work, it might not.
Of course, there is also the question of where those games come from. NES ROMs aren\u2019t legally available from Nintendo, but are widely available nevertheless. We don\u2019t condone piracy, but if you bought a license for Mega Man 2 on Wii, you may feel ethically justified in exerting that IP claim in this plainly extralegal fashion.
That this thing would be hacked was always a matter of when rather than if \u2014 but unlike other consoles put out by Nintendo and others, this one isn\u2019t going to get a patch fixing the exploit. It\u2019s a bit ironic that the very decision Nintendo made that disallowed the device from getting new games legally will make it impossible to prevent new games from being added illegally.<\/p>\n