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Curious about the hardware Nintendo is using to power the new SNES mini? Well, wonder no more. Nintendo has rather cunningly repurposed the exact same technology used in last year's NES mini. Crack open the cute SNES-styled outer layer and the mainboard within is almost a complete match for last year's model. Our suspicions that Nintendo had retained the same hardware platform came from several factors: the controller interface is the same, the HDMI and USB placements are identical, the UI is similar, and general system behaviour is also very reminiscent of last year's hardware. On top of that, the SNES Mini's HDMI output tops out at 720p, another match with the older unit. Our theory was confirmed by this tweet from Chiimaero, and today we broke open both pieces of hardware to get a closer look for ourselves.
Confirming that the internal mainboard is the same, the corners - carved out to fit within the NES mini shell - remain the same on the SNES model, even though there is no real need for them to be touched at all. As a result, the new piece of hardware looks slightly less elegant internally. Hardware-wise, we're looking at the same off-the-shelf Allwinner R16 SoC (system on chip), featuring four ARM Cortex A7s paired with an ARM Mali 400 MP2 GPU. Hynix provides the single memory chip - a 256MB DDR3 module - and there's a generous 512MB of NAND storage.
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