Analogue did something quietly radical this week: it dug up its best retro consoles and gave them Wi-Fi. The new Super Nt Plus and Mega Sg Plus are essentially the same FPGA-powered cartridge readers that purists have worshipped for years, now with a "reworked industrial design" and built-in wireless connectivity for controllers and accessories. Which is exactly the kind of move that makes you wonder why nobody did it sooner, and whether the original versions just became instant collectibles. This is the same company that shipped the Analogue 3D with 4K output for Nintendo 64 titles, so the fact that these new 1080p consoles skip the resolution bump tells you something about where Analogue thinks the real friction lives. It's not the pixels. It's the cord. And if you've ever tripped over a SNES controller cable at 2 a.m., you already know. Speaking of small upgrades that solve real problems, Your luggage twin is rolling by right now, unless you pick these two new shades, RIMOWA's two new colors quietly fix the baggage claim chaos in exactly the same spirit: a tiny change that changes everything. Meanwhile, Leatherman's sharpest EDC tools quietly slashed to half off proves that sometimes the best upgrade is just a better price on something that already works.
Here's the thing nobody in the launch video will say plainly: these are the same consoles, just less annoying to use. The Super Nt and Mega Sg were already the gold standard for playing original cartridges without emulation, the FPGA chip inside them recreates the original hardware at the transistor level, so every pixel, every audio glitch, every frame-rate drop in *Super Mario World* behaves exactly as it did in 1990. The new Plus versions don't change that. What they change is the ritual. Instead of digging out a controller with a frayed cable that's short enough to tether you to the TV stand, you just pair a wireless pad and sit wherever you want. That USB-C port means you can power the thing with the same cable you use for your laptop, which is the kind of mundane detail that retro enthusiasts will argue about for years. Analogue isn't selling you a better picture. It's selling you a cleaner living room and a shorter path to pressing start.
The question that keeps buzzing under this announcement is the one Analogue never quite answers: who exactly are these for now? The original Super Nt and Mega Sg launched into a world where FPGA consoles were rare and mysterious. Today, you can buy a dozen emulation boxes for fifty bucks, and Analogue's own Analogue 3D exists at a higher price point with more impressive specs. The Plus models sit in a weird middle ground, they're too expensive to impulse-buy, too niche for casuals, and too similar to the originals for collectors who already own them. But that's also exactly why they matter. Analogue is betting that there's a whole group of people who never bought the first versions because they couldn't stomach the cable situation, or because they wanted a slightly more modern chassis. Those people now have no excuse. And for anyone who already owns a Super Nt or Mega Sg, the real takeaway is brutally practical: your resale value just went up, and your reason to upgrade just didn't appear.
The detail to watch isn't the Wi-Fi or the USB-C port. It's whether Analogue ever releases a firmware update that lets these new consoles talk to each other, or to modern displays in ways the originals couldn't. Because right now, the wireless connectivity is strictly for controllers and accessories, not for online play, not for save-state sharing, not for anything that actually uses that network chip to do something a cable couldn't. If that door stays closed, these are just prettier versions of the same box with one less cord. If it opens, the Plus name finally earns its punctuation.