I’ll be honest — when I first saw the headline “1080p HDMI mod for the Super Nintendo”, I rolled my eyes a little. We’ve been down this road before. Slap an upscaler on an old console, call it a day, and charge $200 for the privilege. But then I dug into what Stanislav Parhomovich is actually doing with the Superswitch HD, and yeah — this one’s different. This one’s proper.
Not Another Upscaler
Here’s the key thing: the Superswitch HD isn’t just intercepting the SNES’s analogue output and cleaning it up. It’s going digital to digital. The mod connects directly to the digital buses of the PPU2 (the picture processing unit) and the CPU, pulling the raw pixel data before it ever gets converted to analogue. That data is then reconstructed — brightness and all — and output over HDMI at 1080p.
That’s a fundamentally different approach, and it matters a lot. Every time a signal goes through a digital-to-analogue conversion and then back again, you lose something. There’s noise, there’s signal degradation, and the image quality suffers in ways that are subtle but real — especially on a modern 4K TV that’s already doing its own processing on top. By staying entirely in the digital domain, the Superswitch HD sidesteps all of that. You’re getting the closest possible representation of what the SNES actually produced, displayed crisply on your living room screen.
The same developer previously did this for the Sega Genesis with the Megaswitch HD, which got a strong reception in the retro community. The SNES version is the natural next step, and it’s been in prototype/announcement phase as of late March 2026 — with the community watching closely.
Why This Matters to Me
I’ve got a genuine soft spot for the Super Nintendo. It was the console of my formative years — Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Donkey Kong Country. These games didn’t just hold up; they defined what good game design actually looked like. The art direction and the Mode 7 tricks and the raw creativity of working within tight hardware constraints — it was all peak craft.
But playing those games on original hardware in 2026 comes with friction. RGB SCART leads, upscalers, OSSC setups, CRT monitors — there’s a whole rabbit hole. I respect the CRT purists; I really do. There’s something undeniably gorgeous about a quality CRT with a proper RGB feed. But for a lot of us, we just want to sit on the couch, plug into the TV that’s already there, and play. The Superswitch HD promises to make that experience genuinely excellent rather than just acceptable.
The Technical Side (For the Nerds)
The three-chip SNES — that’s the original model with a separate S-CPU, S-PPU1, and S-PPU2 — is what this mod targets. The architecture is actually helpful here because the PPU2 and CPU expose digital signals that can be tapped. Stanislav’s approach reconstructs the brightness data from those buses, which is the tricky part — the SNES outputs a composite sync signal and the brightness/luma information has to be accurately reconstructed to avoid any colour or contrast weirdness.
There’s a prototype video floating around that demonstrates it working, and the output looks remarkably clean. No fringing, proper pixel edges, no weird colour shifting. It’s upscaled 1080p, so it’s not magic — you’re still looking at SNES-resolution artwork scaled up — but it’s the sharpest and most faithful way to do that scaling short of a dedicated FPGA-based scaler like an OSSC or RetroTINK downstream.
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet. Given the Megaswitch HD’s reception, I’d expect strong demand when it does launch. These boutique hardware mods tend to sell out fast in the retro community — if you’re interested, I’d keep an eye on the Superswitch HD page and Stanislav’s channels.
The Bigger Picture
What I love about the retro hardware modding scene is that it’s fundamentally driven by genuine passion. Nobody’s getting rich selling SNES mods. The people doing this work — Stanislav, the folks behind the RetroTINK lineup, the FPGA developers at Analogue — they’re enthusiasts first. They care deeply about preserving the authentic experience of this hardware and making it accessible for modern setups.
And there’s something philosophically interesting happening here too. As AI-upscaling and software emulation get better and better, there’s a growing counter-movement of people who want the real thing — actual silicon, actual hardware cycles, actual scanlines (or clean versions thereof). The Superswitch HD is a perfect example: it’s not emulation, it’s not software trickery. It’s the original SNES chip doing its thing, captured cleanly before any signal degradation, and sent to your TV. That’s the best of both worlds.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we relate to old technology — and the SNES modding scene is a microcosm of a broader cultural impulse to keep physical, tangible hardware alive and relevant. There’s real value in that. Not just nostalgia, but craft, preservation, and a refusal to let good things quietly disappear.
Anyway. If you’ve got a three-chip SNES sitting in a box somewhere, now might be the time to dig it out. The next few months could be very good for SNES owners.
— Chris
