A look into the tech and emulation of the Super NES Classic Edition

Digital Foundry has taken an extensive look at the Super NES Classic Edition. The site’s report is based on the European version, but all units are essentially the same – just with slightly different designs.

First, similar to the NES Mini, the SNES Classic Edition only outputs at 720p. That makes sense though based on the way games used to run.

One aspect European fans will be happy to hear about is that all of the games are based on the North American versions. That means each title runs at 60Hz as opposed to the poorer PAL versions.

A significant improvement the SNES Classic Edition has over its predecessor concerns scaling. The 4:3 option thankfully ditches the scaling artifacts from last year’s hardware. You could run into some artifacts on a digital fixed pixel display when scrolling, but Nintendo did implement a subtle interpolation feature in order still preserves the sharp pixels.

The SNES Classic Edition does have a slight miss with the CRT filter. Video artifacts aren’t present, but a filtered image with faint scanlines is here instead. Comparing the CRT filter with a true CRT shows a notable difference. Noise was also spotted in the video signal.

Digital Foundry finds that the actual emulation is of high-quality and an improvement over the Virtual Console. As we know, the hardware is even capable of emulating the Super FX chip, something not possible with the VC thus far. The background in Yoshi’s Island does have an oddity, but Digital Foundry speculates that it could be an anti-seizure measure. Although not perfect, the sound quality appears to be an improvement over the NES Classic Edition.

This is all just an overview of Digital Foundry’s analysis. You can watch the full video below, including a look at Star Fox 2.