The greatest 16-bit RPG, and possibly game ever made turned 30 in North America last week. While we wish there were something cooking to show off, there are only the usual rumors circulating. A Compendium update is underway, with hopefully more to follow after that.
I'll take the opportunity here to plug the noble art of console restoration. We're approaching a bottleneck where some aluminum electrolytic capacitors may be failing, along with other components that disable old consoles. While shotgun recapping isn't always a good idea, it's common that many unaware owners end up tossing their Super Nintendos or other game consoles in the trash rather than opening them up, or sending them to someone who knows how to inspect them for damage/repair. The same goes for cartridges—my Super Mario RPG CR2032 battery survived just long enough for me to dump the SRAM last year, but many have long since failed by this point, and on some cartridges, the SRAM chips themselves may have gone bad.
It's always a bad idea to just throw these away. There are some modifications that can prolong the life of your hardware, like replacing the 1A voltage regulator in the SNES with one that has higher headroom. Consider also buying a Variac, and slowly ramping up the voltage when you turn on your vintage hardware. (Integrated circuits tend to go bad more from temperature cycling than anything.) For your cartridges, you can clean the contacts/pads using a Q-tip and isopropyl alcohol (don't blow on them!). On the extreme end, restorationists can even replace a bad PPU or other surface mount chip with a donor chip from an unsalveagable SNES. All of this goes for your controllers and handhelds, too—bad N64 sticks can be fairly easily and cheaply replaced and contacts can be cleaned. My Game Boy's dead audio came back to life after cleaning the headphone jack's interior contacts, which were erroneously detecting a headphone present from dirt/corrosion and thus weren't allowing the signal to reach the speaker. Rarely is a unit truly unfixable, so if you've got old hardware, be gentle and help usher it into another 30 years of 16-bit gaming.
