Nature abhors a vacuum – and so does the video games industry. Over the last year, Nintendo and Sony have each announced new versions of their classic consoles: the Mini NES and SNES machines are outselling modern platforms, and the forthcoming PlayStation Classic is stirring up interest. So what of Sega, the creator of the Master System and the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis), the console that brought the arcade home in the late 1980s? When it comes to retro consoles, until now there have only been cheap third-party Mega Drive retro consoles, which often have popular games built-in but use software emulation to replicate the original hardware. This has meant that games often run with terrible input lag and tend to look horrible on contemporary LED displays, making for a disappointing nostalgic experience.

There's another Super Nintendo on the block, and this one means business. Not the lucrative sort Nintendo's sold out Super NES Classic seems to be doing as availability bulletins circulate like whispers of a ghost. Nor the steady sort Nintendo's handheld 3DS has been up to for years, dishing up choice SNES downloads by way of its Virtual Console. But business the way an audio engineer means when retooling decades-old tunes for playback on modern audio hardware. Or as a film preservationist does when cleaning and converting acetate film to digital ones and zeroes. It's called the Super Nt, plays some of the medium's most treasured games (like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), and judging from the literature its Seattle-based boutique hardware-maker sent over, it's poised to be a Super Nintendo nonpareil.

Trying to play an NES cartridge on Nintendo's original, 30-year-old hardware can be an exercise in frustration. The console's ancient composite cables offer terrible image quality on modern televisions, and getting games to actually run is a ballet of reseating, jostling and, of course, blowing on game cartridges. Nintendo's own NES Classic Edition and the Wii U and 3DS virtual consoles offer refuge for the casual gamer's nostalgic yearnings, but collectors looking for an authentic, cartridge-based retro gaming experience have long suffered under the dark shadow of compromise. Is it better to play on the original, but unreliable, hardware, or an NES clone plagued with compatibility issues? With the Analogue Nt mini, you may not have to tolerate either -- but at $449, Analogue's compromise-free Nintendo doesn't come cheap.