Nintendo is all set to launch the NES Classic later this week for $60, with the console featuring the same iconic styling as the NES, albeit in a diminutive size (it fits in your palm). The console comes pre-loaded with 30 games, and even since its announcement, there has been considerable interest in seeing if there’s a possibility of adding more.
That debate has been put to the rest by GameSpot senior reviews editor Peter Brown, who posted the following image on Twitter that shows the flash memory soldered to the motherboard:
Unless you want to desolder flash memory from the motherboard, looks like it’s impossible to add new games to NES Classic. pic.twitter.com/jc99WSrNJj
— Peter Brown (@PCBrown) November 2, 2016
Essentially, what this means is that you’re stuck with the 30 games that come out of the box. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, as the titles include the greatest hits of the 1980s, from Castlevania to Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and many more. But if you’re looking for ways to add more games to the NES Classic, you won’t be able to do so.
According to Reddit, the hardware powering the NES Classic is a quad-core Allwinner 16 SoC with four Cortex A7 CPU cores and Mali 400MP2 GPU, 256MB DDR3 RAM, and 512MB flash storage. While that may not seem like much when seen against the likes of the PlayStation 4 Pro, the NES Classic is significantly more powerful than the console it is trying to emulate. As for the emulator itself, it looks like Nintendo is running Linux with custom software tweaks to run the ROMs.
