There's never been a better time to be a retro video game enthusiast. Playing old video games on modern screens used to require elaborate cabling and detailed electronics knowledge, or you would have to wade into dodgy ROM sites and tinker with confusing emulators. Today, however, we are blessed with a panoply of options, led by Nintendo's "classic" mini-consoles. But the premium, top-of-the-line retro console maker remains the hipsterish British-American company, Analogue. Analogue's Super NT, a Super Nintendo (SNES) hardware emulator released last year, was a revitalization of the SNES library ready to plug and play (and upscale) to modern HD televisions with a graphical fidelity unmatched by even Nintendo's own offerings.

It's difficult to think of 2018 as a year with anything worth celebrating. But despite all the bad news the year dealt us, there were successes -- if you know where to look. In all corners of tech, we saw wins big and small. There were advances in obvious categories like laptops, smartphones and the connected home, but we also looked outside the mainstream for some of the more surprising gems. Think mini synthesizers for music nerds, retro emulators for nostalgic gamers and e-readers for modern book snobs. Humanity also collectively triumphed, as our space exploration programs broke new frontiers this year and we began to confront the increasingly real question: Should we all just move to Mars? We're just two weeks away from what is hopefully a much better 12 months, and the Engadget team took some time to commemorate our favorite gadgets and trends in tech.

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.