The official story is that NES Mini will only ever run the 30 included games (opens in new tab), since Nintendo has no plans to sell extra titles for the nostalgia-oozing system. But the people want more, more, more! And if you’re not afraid to hook your adorable palm-sized NES up to a computer for some good ol’ hacking, you can have more. Just… please don’t break it, ok? There are so few of those things to go around already.
Here’s one modder showing off an 84-game collection.
The console holds up remarkably well to its game collection being suddenly tripled, duly adding the new additions to the menu in alphabetical order. Though the scroll bar on the bottom of the screen is no match for a collection of that magnitude.
Before you get too excited, users have reported running into problems when they try to load up more than 90 games. And a comment on that video points out that loading up a bunch of extra games will limit how many restore points / save states you can keep. Nintendo didn’t put a bunch of extra storage on there just for hackers’ benefit, y’know.
Here are the instructions (opens in new tab) for adding extra games to an NES Mini. Just keep in mind that this is not an officially supported function; if you accidentally mess anything up, Nintendo won’t help you out. And playing the ROM for a game that you don’t own could be illegal depending on where you live. Hack at your own risk.
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