SNES on Vx

Jose64141 · 2026-10-08T01:40:11+0100

Hey
I wanted to share this lil port I made of PocketSNES (TI Nspire version by gameblabla) to the Verifone Vx520C terminal.

Code in this repo. Similar to the TI Version there's no sound support. Also missing is USB drive loading. The keypad has a great delay between presses so I added USB keyboard support (didn't have luck with gamepads)

DanTheManMS · 2026-10-08T05:50:46+0100

Those terminals are only supposed to simply take credit card payments, right? What sort of internal specs do those even have? The fact that there's enough processing power to run an SNES emulator is astounding!

I had to do a double-take for a moment, because PocketSNES happened to be the original name for SNES Advance for the GBA, which also did not emulate the sound and had similar performance to the Verifone terminal in your video (until you showed Super Mario Kart that is; PocketSNES-turned-SNES-Advance couldn't emulate the coprocessor chip).

Jose64141 · 2026-10-08T12:54:25+0100

DanTheManMS said:
Those terminals are only supposed to simply take credit card payments, right? What sort of internal specs do those even have? The fact that there's enough processing power to run an SNES emulator is astounding!

I had to do a double-take for a moment, because PocketSNES happened to be the original name for SNES Advance for the GBA, which also did not emulate the sound and had similar performance to the Verifone terminal in your video (until you showed Super Mario Kart that is; PocketSNES-turned-SNES-Advance couldn't emulate the coprocessor chip).

They're actually quite performant! It has an ARM11 @ 400MHz (the TI Nspire CX II has an ARM9 @ 396MHz for comparison) and 32MB of RAM. This Vx520C is based on the older Vx520, the only differences being keypad, 3G and color. There's the similar Vx675 which has 64MB of RAM and a battery.
Both ports just send a framebuffer to the screen, so all emulation is handled by the Snes9x core on CPU. The screen is 320x240.
So all things considered, the first thought that came to my mind was "this is basically the same as a TI Nspire, I should port a port" lol!

Well that's interesting! I checked out of curiosity tho, and the Pocket SNES Advance website clarifies it's different from PocketSNES, which was apparently targeted for Pocket PCs. In both cases it's pretty cool to know, specially 'cause all GitHub repos don't mention the historical source lol

VmprHntrD · 2026-10-08T15:42:25+0100

But can it run (SNES) Doom?

SNES on Vx

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