Analogue, the company behind the terminally out-of-stock Analogue Pocket and Analogue 3D, is trying to draw you back to 1991… again. Its new Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+ play original Super Nintendo and Genesis cartridges natively, all while scaling them to a more modern screen resolution.
The Analogue Mega Sg+ also has a spacer to plug in a Sega CD attachment. © Analogue
The new $220 miniature consoles are both a redux of the previous Super Nt and Mega Sg first launched in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Both devices were left to languish over the last few years without a meaningful update. Now, eight years later, the Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+ add a few quality-of-life improvements. Chief among them is the inclusion of a built-in 2.4GHz receiver that Analogue claims is compatible with several 8BitDo controllers and arcade sticks (such as the SN30 or M30 SNES and Genesis recreation controller), alongside Bluetooth compatibility. Of course, both still have two ports apiece for plugging in your ancient gamepads.
If you were hoping for even more compatibility, there’s a USB-C and USB-A port in the rear of both consoles. While you could use these ports to plug in more wired controllers, Analogue suggests you can plug in a DAC (digital-to-analogue converter) for video output or for headphones and speakers. The cables mean you can power each console with a typical USB cable, which may save you extra space on your already-crowded power strip.
© Analogue 
© Analogue
The Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+ both upscale your retro games to 1080p, though that may come as a disappointment to those used to the Analogue 3D’s 4K upscaling for Nintendo 64 titles. Each box still supports widescreens (though you’ll be playing your games in the traditional 8:7 aspect ratio with black bars around each picture). You’ll also get access to a special menu when running each title that can let you adjust audio levels, resolution, and screen size.
If you wondering why the new consoles don’t upscale to 1080p, Christopher Taber, the founder and CEO of Analogue, told Gizmodo that the consoles “don’t need” to hit the heights of your TV’s max resolution to do the job. Here’s the full technical breakdown:
“Each console belongs to the 2D era. The games are built from relatively large, deliberately placed pixels, tile-based backgrounds, sprites, and simple transparency or dithering effects. Once those pixels are scaled cleanly to 1080p, the essential image is already present. Moving to 4K does not uncover hidden texture detail or additional geometry. It primarily creates more display pixels with which to draw the same underlying artwork.
That is different from the Analogue 3D. Nintendo 64 games combine very low rendering resolutions with anti-aliasing, texture filtering, dithering, translucency, and other techniques designed around the behavior of a CRT. A completely clean digital presentation can expose harsh edges, noisy patterns, blurry texture filtering, and visual compromises that the original display helped integrate into a coherent image.”
Each console is running an FPGA chip, specifically the Altera Cyclone V. That acronym stands for field programmable gate array. These processors attempt to recreate the chip logic of the original device, meaning you can play your games natively without running any software emulation. There are other devices that attempt the same, like the Epilogue SN Operator, for playing old Super Nintendo games on your computer. The issue there is that they rely on software emulation, which attempts to recreate the console as software.
Both new Analogue devices promise to play ‘100%’ of the games from the original consoles. © Analogue
Analogue also claims its console supports 100% of the games released for both SNES and Genesis, including both the PAL and NTSC versions of each game. Both the Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+ go up for preorder on Oct. 19 for $220 a piece. You have a few options for front plate colors, but who knows if Analogue will release yet another drool-worthy limited edition colorway that will make you regret life’s choices?
This article was updated to include a statement from Analogue CEO Christopher Taber about why the Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+ only upscale to 1080p.