Hyperkin’s SupaBoy Is Back Again — Same Handheld, Two New Coats of Paint

The SupaBoy has had more lives than most handhelds twice its price. First released back in 2011, reissued as the SupaBoy S in 2016, reissued again as the SupaBoy SFC in 2018, and now — nearly 15 years after it first turned up — it’s getting yet another refresh. This autumn, Hyperkin is launching two new colourways: SupaBoy Crimson and SupaBoy Prime.

What’s Actually New Here?

Honestly? Not much, and that’s fine. The SupaBoy has always sold itself on one simple idea: it’s a portable SNES that plays your actual, physical SNES and Super Famicom cartridges. No ROMs, no downloads, no faffing about with an SD card — you slot the cart in the back and it just works. Crimson leans into a red-and-white palette that nods at the Famicom, while Prime uses the PAL/Japanese SNES button colours. Both come in translucent plastic shells, which is a nice touch if you’re the sort of person who likes seeing the internals of your hardware even when you can’t do anything about them.

What hasn’t changed, as far as anyone can tell: this is still a system-on-a-chip handheld, not an FPGA device. If you’re chasing frame-perfect, cycle-accurate SNES emulation, this was never the machine for you, and it still isn’t. What you’re buying is convenience and nostalgia in roughly equal measure — the ability to dig out a cartridge you haven’t touched in twenty years and just play it, on a screen, on your sofa or on a train.

Worth Buying?

Depends what you want out of it. If you’ve already got a shelf of original SNES or Super Famicom carts gathering dust, the SupaBoy line has always been the easiest way to actually use them again without dragging a CRT out of the loft. The existing “Hyper Beach” colourway is available right now if you don’t want to wait for autumn, and gives you a solid sense of what Crimson and Prime will play like — same guts, different jacket.

If you’re after accuracy over convenience, this still isn’t your machine. But if the appeal was ever “plug in a cartridge and go,” Hyperkin hasn’t given you any new reason to stop believing in that, and Crimson and Prime just give you a better-looking way to do it.

Crimson and Prime are due this autumn. No price has been confirmed yet, though the current Hyper Beach model retails at $119.99.