Tom Murphy, aka Tom7, has found a way to manipulate NES cartridges so that they can truly outperform what would usually be expected from them. Tom hacks the circuit boards of these cartridges, equipping them with Raspberry Pi 3 mini-computers. The Pi plays host to a number of SNES ROMs which are all filtered through a special program, translating the necessary data into something the NES can read and essentially display on a TV.
If you want to see all of this happening in action, check out the video below. The idea starts to take shape at around 5:40, and if you skip ahead to 16:12, you'll see Tom placing the finished NES cartridge into the system, allowing the NES to play the SNES classic Super Mario World. This is some kind of Back To The Future-style wizardry that goes well over our heads, but it's pretty amazing to see.
Subscribe to Nintendo Life on
This isn't the only interesting project that Tom7 has created, though. A few years back he created a computer program that could learn how to play NES games on its own, with just tiny amount of instruction from the player. Somehow, though, seeing Super Mario World be played on a NES just seems even more crazy. We're all used to Virtual Console, where retro games are played on newer systems, but reversing that is very interesting indeed.
