Super Nt
This month we put the Super Nt through its paces, play the latest Kirby game and go for a spin with the remaster of Burnout Paradise Reviewed By our very own NT
We’ve always been interested in Analogue Interactive’s retro consoles. The company is clearly proud of its craft, and the likes of the CMVS (a Neo-geo Mvs-based console), Nt and Nt Mini (both NES consoles) were always attractive and feature-rich, but extraordinarily expensive. The Super Nt is arguably the company’s first play at the mass market – it promises to play your SNES games better than anything else, and it comes in at less than $200.
Like previous Analogue machines, the Super Nt is an attractive device. The machine’s plastic casing design resembles that of the Super Famicom and PAL SNES, but it’s considerably smaller – slightly shorter and only a couple of centimetres wider than a PC Engine, in fact. The machine comes in four colour schemes – black, transparent, classic (American SNES) and SF (European/japanese SNES).
It’s a weighty device and has a rubber base to prevent any slipping or pulling accidents. The case doesn’t offer more than what is absolutely necessary – two control ports and a cartridge slot, a power switch and reset button, HDMI port and micro USB power port, and an SD card slot for firmware updates.
Unlike other Snes-compatible consoles out there, the Super Nt is powered by an FPGA (fieldprogrammable gate array). This is a type of hardware emulation, rather than the software emulation used on devices such as the Retron 5, the Super Retro-cade and even Nintendo’s very own Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES, or the system-on-a-chip solutions used in other machines. In theory, this provides the best of all worlds – a solution where the machine behaves exactly like the original hardware, offering zero lag and full compatibility, while outputting modern digital video with lots of lovely options for filters, scanlines and more.
Hats off to the Analogue team, because the FPGA approach seems to have paid off handsomely. The
Super Nt handled everything we threw at it without a hitch – compared to a genuine NTSC SNES, nothing was out of place, off or amiss. Our tests included Super FX games, SA-1 chip games and even the recent Data East Classic Collection that trips up software emulation-based consoles. While we haven’t been able to test everything, we can’t fault Analogue’s claims for compatibility.
If you’re a SNES neophyte and don’t have any games of your own yet, Super Turrican:
The Director’s Cut and Super
Turrican 2 have been licensed as built-in games ready for you to play. Super Turrican: The Director’s Cut is a particularly notable inclusion as it has never been released before – this represents the original 6Mbit design, rather than the compromised four megabit Super Turrican that came out on cartridge. The inclusion of two high-quality games is a nice touch, especially given the prices they’d now fetch.
The picture quality here is unmatched. The option for 1080p output beats the 720p offered by the Retron 5 and Retro Freak, and there’s none of the softness seen on the system-on-a-chip clone consoles – the Super Nt offers razor-sharp. We were also pleased to see true 50Hz support. The sound is also excellent, output at 48KHZ. Both audio and video can be tweaked in the system menu, accessed by pressing down and select during gameplay (a combination that can be changed), and is clean and simple to navigate. Two different types of scanlines are on offer, with a sliding intensity scale to adjust to your preference. A variety of visual filters are also on offer, as well as extensive scaling and aspect ratio options. You can also set your SNES region as necessary and even change