Finally got one of these for Christmas and it's great little system. I know you can emulate SNES really easily on just about anything these days, but there is something about having a mini SNES with real controllers from the real company.
And yes you can build a similar setup for less with a Pi and clone case, but Nintendo have done an excellent job with the interface and emulation. My SNES Mini was picked up for £69 from Currys. I love the fact they haven't just included the features of the original game carts with their save slots in game, but also included savestates. Plus you can change the display settings to emulate scanlines or pixel prefect.
Only annoying thing is it doesn't come with a power supply. It's USB powered, needing a supply that provides 5V 2A. This is a pretty standard power requirement for most usb powered systems these days. My smartphone adapter can run this, but luckily when I upgraded the electrics in my house last year I included a load of wall sockets with built in usb sockets that can supply 5v 3.1a and it works perfectly with the SNES Mini, so no power adapters! If you do consider getting some usb wall sockets make sure you get ones that supply 3.1A or higher. The cheapest ones only apply 1.5A and are not powerful enjoy to charge modern smartphones or run devices like this.
The only negative is how addictive Nintendo games are! After connecting it up I decided to have a quick go at some of the 21 games included. Problem is I started Zelda and got hooked again. Suddenly realised it was 2am last night and I had obtained all the little extras I could to that point such as extra heart pieces, Ice rod etc and already have one pendant and at the entrance to get the next one. Great game I'm going to have to complete again now. Lol.
Next week I'm going to hack it and add some more SNES games, plus put the emulation layer on and then add some NES, Megadrive, NeoGeo etc games. I might add some N64 games, but only 6 are currently reported to be fully working. Emulation layers are being worked on so it might improve, but I'm not that fussed about anything newer than 16bit for this little system. It can managed to emulate up to PSP and PS1. Will also be expanding the storage by storing all the roms on a usb stick. Great fun.
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