When you’re surrounded by a hoard of old physical Nintendo cartridges, lacking an easy way to play them all can feel like you’re sitting on a gold mine without a single pick in sight. Finally, the company that made it easy to bring your Game Boy games to PC now has a similar device for all the lingering Super Nintendo titles gathering dust in your closet.
Epilogue, which sells the popular GB Operator, is planning to ship its $60 SN Operator starting in April of next year. The company (not to be confused with Analogue, a separate retro emulation company) first teased this device all the way back in May 2024. Now, we finally know that it will launch for preorders on Dec. 30 at 12 p.m. ET. Epilogue promised on Twitter/X that customers who don’t preorder can still expect to get an Operator after release.
The device is compatible with PC, Mac, or Steam Deck. Plus, the Operator should make it easy to backup your game on your computer, so you may not need the cartridge if you want to immediately jump into your retro games. Thanks to the Playback app, the device will also back up your saves and make it seamless to swap between computer and console. The SN Operator and app in tandem will allow for co-op as well. The app also supports RetroAchievements, though you’re free to choose another emulator that may support more of your preferred shaders.
While Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance games made use of some extra peripherals, you can get much more mileage out of SNES games on PC. The SN Operator will support mouse controls for the old Super Nintendo mouse and SuperScope, so you don’t have to opt for the Nintendo Switch 2’s retro game library and Joy-Con 2 mouse controls. Epilogue makes a big deal of its testing framework, which it promises will preserve the integrity of your games. However, you’ll never be able to experience the same feelings you did as a kid—sitting in front of the glow of a CRT TV—without the original hardware.
This device isn’t the same as hardware emulation through FPGA, or field programmable gate array chips. It’s reading the data on the cartridge and letting a program that emulates the SNES hardware as software do the rest. Analogue no longer sells its Super NT SNES device, but you can opt for MiSTer products if you don’t mind sourcing a shell yourself. Overall, FPGA is still emulation, so it may still result in some differences compared to how games felt back in 1991.
As for other consoles, Epilogue has routinely hinted that it plans to make an Operator device for NES sometime in the future. If you were looking for ways to digitize your retro collection, this may be a great start. We’re hoping it won’t be long before there’s a way to hook up all our old N64 or Nintendo DS Game Paks, too.
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