Enlarge (credit: Nintendo)

Aside from a hands-off display at New York Comic-Con, we haven’t seen or heard much about the upcoming, mini-sized NES Classic Edition since its first announcement in July. Now, new information is coming from Nintendo itself and from journalists at a recent hands-on preview event. They bring both good and bad news for retro Nintendo fans.

On the good side, the NES Mini apparently does have a few graphical options to play with. A recently updated promotional page now highlights three different visual modes: “pixel perfect” (i.e. square pixels), 4:3 (i.e. cathode ray tube ratio), and “CRT filter” (i.e. simulated scan lines on your HDTV). Nintendo also notes that you can create four “Suspend Points” for each of the 30 games on the system. You can lock any of those points so they don’t accidentally get saved over.

Hands-on reports from journalists also confirm what we first surmised from an earlier NES Classic Edition trailer: that the emulated graphics and colors on the NES Classic Edition’s 30 built-in games are much more faithful to the original games than Nintendo’s previous Virtual Console releases. Wired’s Chris Kohler notes that “the whites are sparkling white, and everything pops in bright color” on the new HDMI-powered system.