So how does Analogue's Snes consoles vs SNES mini compare and What does Mega sg mean for official Genesis Mini? As a massive Sega fan should I wait for official Genesis mini or Should I preorder this. So confused but excited anyway lol
That Gunstar Heroes emulation is top notch
SNES Mini and presumably the upcoming Genesis Mini are emulation boxes, they run cheap hardware that emulates the systems. They also come with a number of ROMs built in (buy the box for its 20 or 30 games). The Nintendo boxes have been decent quality, but add a lot of lag and definitely aren't all that accurate (though better than the old Virtual Console).
These Analogue machines are a huge step up from that - first off they use real cartridges, not downloaded ROMs (not officially anyways). More importantly, they use an FPGA, which is a chip that can be reconfigured to recreate any other chip or group of chips (FPGAs are used these days to prototype new chips in fact). It's not emulation, but basically recreating the original hardware, and altering it slightly for direct HD video and audio output straight from the chips that create the video and audio signals, so there is no latency or upconverting artifacts. It's technically not as perfectly accurate as using the original hardware chips, but Analogue has a very dedicated FPGA programmer who reverse engineers the original consoles to the smallest detail, who has been working on this sorta thing for years.
You can get this kind of accuracy from an emulator, but you need a powerful PC to do it, there's no way the really accurate emulators will be ported to a $100 box anytime soon.