Designed by the legendary Gunpei Yokoi and released exclusively in Japan in 1999, the Bandai WonderSwan is a fascinating handheld.
Cheap, compact and powered by a single battery, it was intended to challenge Nintendo's stranglehold on the handheld market, and managed to sell 3.5 million units across its three variants (the monochrome original, WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal).
However, it was never given a global release and remains something of a curiosity – its library is also heavily weighted towards text-heavy Japanese games, which somewhat limits its appeal.
That's a shame, because Square was one of the biggest supporters of the device (it launched just as the company had its famous falling out with Nintendo), and it released several Final Fantasy games and a smattering of cool exclusives on WonderSwan.
In an era where fan translations are available, the news that the WonderSwan is receiving a new flash cart is welcome indeed. 49bitcat has announced that the Nileswan (or 'nileswan' if you prefer) – a product backed by over two years of research and development – is ready for release.
The team's goal has been to create a device which brings "users and homebrew developers the ultimate cartridge solution for the platform," and, on paper, at least, it seems to have achieved just that.
Here are the highlights of the Nileswan, taken from 49bitcat's site:
- Loading programs from a FAT16/FAT32 storage card
- Support for WS/WSC programs up to 16 MiB in size
- Support for the following peripherals:
- SRAM (up to 512 KiB) and EEPROM (up to 2 KiB) saves
- NOR flash and RTC (real-time clock) emulation
- 3-axis accelerometer for homebrew to use
- USB port for development, including WW support
- Upgradeable, open source firmware and software, enabling future feature additions
- Hard gold cartridge contacts for improved longevity
- Recovery button - allows fixing some WSC/SC consoles with internal EEPROM corruption
- Extensive developer documentation
"In practice, this means the Nileswan opens up completely new doors for WS/WSC/PCv2 research and homebrew development while also having very good software compatibility, including first-class WW support."
The Nileswan will retail for 85 EUR / £75 / $98 (excluding shipping, taxes and import duties) and the first batch will be available for purchase via shop.49bitcat.com on the 24th of November 2025 at 16:00 GMT.
Future production will depend on demand, but I imagine this will prove to be a very popular product, even at almost $100.