Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Popular conceptions about Nintendo's release history in Europe claim that their hardware was never released in the former Eastern Bloc until the 21st century. Rather, these countries instead saw the proliferation of various clone consoles called "Famiclones", such as the Dendy (a Taiwanese-built bootleg that achieved widespread popularity in the Commonwealth of Independent States, made up of the ex-republics of the former Soviet Union) and the Pegasus (which became as popular in Poland as the Dendy did in Eastern Europe). However, while Famiclones did indeed dominate the Eastern European gaming market during the 1990s, Nintendo was not only aware of this, but actively attempted to halt the spread of bootlegs in these regions in favor of officially sanctioned products.

In 1994, Nintendo made a deal with Steepler, the Dendy's distributor in Eastern Europe, to permit continued sale of the Dendy in exchange for equal distribution of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy in the Commonwealth of Independent States; official Russian releases of these systems even included Dendy stickers on the packaging to reflect the arrangement. Meanwhile, in various other parts of the former Eastern Bloc, Nintendo made deals with other third-party distributors; among others, the NES, SNES, and Game Boy saw official releases in Poland, Hungary, and the former territories of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia during 1993–1994.

The DSP-1, DSP-2, DSP-3, and DSP-4 enhancement chips were the same kinds of 8MHz NEC µPD77C25 math co-processors used by English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer, which was developed in 1986 after complications of ALS forced him to undergo a tracheotomy, rendering him mute. Because of this shared technology, when the hardware for Hawking's synthesizer started failing in 2017, the original developers were able to create a software version of it by borrowing code from the SNES emulator higan.

In the US, the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System's final official releases in the 1990's were the same game: a port of the original arcade Frogger made to coincide with the PlayStation and PC reboot.

"Blast processing" is a marketing term coined by Sega of America to promote the Sega Genesis as the cooler and more powerful console compared to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was such an effective campaign that it caused Nintendo to spend millions of dollars to ramp up their own smear campaign to rebut the claims, helping to create the textbook example of a "console war" between two rivaling video game companies through aggressive marketing and advertising. It is true that Blast processing as presented in advertisements at the time does not exist in any released Genesis game, but its creation was based on a real, low-level progressive processing method that ultimately went unused by developers in their games.

The basic idea is that the hardware's video processor is "blasted" continuously, with the Genesis' 68000 processor working flat-out to change the color of every individual pixel during an active scan, a process where the "guns" on a CRT screen move from left to right and then down to the next line and so on. It was believed at the time that this function could be used to increase the Genesis' somewhat constrained color palette to showcase 256 color static images if timed right (this number would be exceeded by other developers like Jon Burton from Traveller's Tales who later discovered the trick).

Sega of America senior producer Scott Bayless claimed that technical director Marty Franz first discovered the trick by "hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA [direct memory access] at just the right time", as firing it off at the wrong time would result in the scan lines appearing out of phase. This timing/synchronization issue, on top of the more pressing issue of the feature using all of the 68000's CPU time (meaning that while you could run the feature, you couldn't actually play the games that use it), effectively made it useless for cartridge games, and no shipped Genesis games ever used it. It’s speculated that it could have been used for Sega CD games, as the add-on had its own CPU that could run the feature, but this also did not come to pass.

The people responsible for the name "Blast processing" are Bayless and Sega of America's PR team. They interviewed him about the specs of the console, and he described to them how the feature could "blast data into the DAC's [digital-to-audio converters]". When talking about how the name came about, Bayless assumed the PR team just liked the word "blast" without understanding what he was explaining, and Blast processing was invented by them to more easily and vaguely sum up the technical capabilities of the Genesis when marketing it. Bayless later expressed reservations about the phrase, calling it "ghastly".

It should also be noted that this feature was apparently not exclusive to the Genesis. In 2020, former Sculptured Software programmer Jeff Peters claimed that they discovered a similar technical trick on the SNES before Sega started using the phrase, but it was focused on audio rather than graphics. He claims that when porting Mortal Kombat to the SNES, Sculptured Software encountered an issue where the amount of graphics data being put onto the cartridge meant that sound had to be cut back drastically. To overcome this problem, Peters and his team used a homegrown system which allowed them to read sounds from the cartridge one at a time and blast them directly to a buffer in the sound memory. While the two tricks were achieving different things, it's interesting to note that both were possible on either console, despite Sega's insistence that only the Genesis could achieve Blast processing.

When the Super Famicom first launched in Japan, it was so hard to get that Nintendo had to hold a lottery for which employees would get a Super Famicom. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario series, and Yuji Horii, creator of the Dragon Quest series, claimed that they were each only able to get one.

The SNES burn-in test cartridge used internally for repairs at Nintendo contains a 16-bit rendition of the theme to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

In 2018, rapper Soulja Boy attempted to sell his own line of video game consoles, called the SouljaGame line, sold for $149.99 for a console and $99.99 for a handheld. Advertising claimed that the consoles would be compatible with a variety of consoles' games, including modern platforms like the PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch. They obviously did not have such compatibility, and were rather a generic retro emulator console one could find on small business-oriented retail websites such as Wish and AliExpress loaded with pirated and modified games sold at a markup. Game libraries featured included the Neo Geo, NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, and PlayStation. The only difference from these pre-existing consoles is a photograph of Soulja Boy printed onto the box. He would eventually stop selling SouljaGame consoles, with the website for the console redirecting to Nintendo's 3DS website.

While S-Video and RGB was removed off Model SNS-101. S-Video and RGB can be restored by modding wires to the console.

Nintendo removed the Eject Button, Expansion Port, LED Power Light, S-Video, and RGB from the SNES Model SNS-101 in order to lower the price for re-releasing the SNES as a smaller Console.

Nintendo planned to create the CD Add-on for the SNES. Nintendo partnered with Sony and Philips to create the CD Add-on, but it was ultimately cancelled. This agreement allowed Philips to use Nintendo's IP on their own Gaming Console, the "Phillips CD-i.

Sony's own gaming ventures appear to have been influenced by this as the canceled reader was dubbed "The Play Station", akin to the PlayStation.

The character which would eventually become Captain Falcon for the game F-Zero was originally conceived as a potential mascot for the SNES. F-Zero's designer, Takaya Imamura, revealed in an interview that "So I started thinking about a character who would match the colors of the Super Famicom controller, with some red and blue and yellow."

The SNES, like many electronic devices of its time, had its outer casing made from a type of plastic called acrylonitrite butadiene styrene, or ABS for short. To make the console more fire-resistant, a large amount of bromine (a naturally brown liquid) was added to the ABS mixture. When exposed to ultraviolet light and/or heat, the bromine breaks free to oxidize, causing the normally grey plastic to turn yellow over time.

In 1998, TranDirect Holding was planning to release a cartridge for the SNES to be used for online banking at home. The reason was because many households lacked a PC to do it from. The service was backed by Nintendo of America, and even would've come with a special SNES keyboard controller, however, it was never released.

A North American Super Nintendo isn't software region-locked. By carefully removing two stubs of plastic inside of the cartridge slot, a Super Famicom game can be inserted and played without issue.

Since the Super Nintendo wasn't powerful enough to emulate a GameBoy with software, the Super GameBoy actually contained all the hardware of a regular GameBoy except for the screen and buttons.

In Japan, Nintendo decided to ship the Super Famicom at night to avoid being robbed by the Yazuka.

The Multi-Purpose Arcade Combat Simulator (M.A.C.S.) was a shooting simulator developed by Sculptured Software and was made for the U.S. army to train shooting skills to soldiers. The simulator uses a light gun replica of a Jäger AP 74 and is far more accurate than the Super Scope.

British actor and comedian Rik Mayall appeared in several advertisements in the UK for the SNES, including "Super Mario All-Stars" and "Link's Awakening". He used the money he earned to buy a house in London which he nicknamed "Nintendo Towers". He also starred in the cartoon "King Arthur's Disasters" which included a familiar looking merchant, selling the main character a donkey named "Kong".

Early in its development, Nintendo planned on making the SNES backward compatible by having a second cartridge slot for NES games. Nintendo ultimately decided against it, as it would have made the SNES around $75 more expensive.

Due to South Korea banning Japanese cultural imports at the end of World War II, the SNES was distributed by South Korean company Hyundai, and was named the Super Comboy.