Nintendo's recently released NES Classic Edition certainly had everything right except for the fact that it doesn't allow users to add any games to its fixed collection of 30 NES games. Needless to say, this limitation has piqued hackers' interest until they managed to open the mini-console up less than 2 months after it was launched.
A Russian modder succeeded in breaking the NES Classic Edition protection and run normal NES ROMs on it. In a post on Russian gaming community GBX, user ProSharen listed a step-by-step guide to unlock the mini-console and load homebrew as well as traditional NES ROMs on it.
The instructions were translated to English and posted on YouTube by several users, but be warned that they are not that easy to follow. The steps involve entering the console's recovery (FEL) mode and tinkering with its kernel then modifying the ROMs themselves. Unless you really do understand what you are doing, there is no guarantee that the process won't damage your device irrevocably and there is no guarantee that any specific NES ROM would run correctly.
Reddit NES Classic Mods subreddit users scanned the tools required to hack the mini console and found some issues which they believe to be false positive. Some users then went on with applying the hack and reported being able to play games such as TMNT 2, Tetris, Tiny Toons and Battletoads without problems.
