Beautiful wooden case for a portable NES

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

After building a few portable gaming systems, [Parker] wanted to try something a little different than the usual sleek plastic builds. He decided to go with a nice wooden classic NES. He started by gutting a NOAC or Nintendo On A Chip. The NOAC has already done most of the miniaturization for him, so he was mainly focusing on the portability. While this wasn’t the most extreme mod, it wasn’t just a case swap either. He took great pictures of the process of modifying the screen to work and putting everything together. The final product is fantastic looking.

The first comment we thought was, why is the game facing backward? Due to the shape of the NOAC board, he would have had to either add more depth to the case, or extended and flipped the actual cartridge plug to make the game face forward, so we can understand why he left it alone.

Filed Under: nintendo hacks Tagged With: ,

Using an NES controller with an Atari 2600

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Instructibles user [Danjovic] managed to get his hands on an Atari 2600, but all the joysticks were damaged beyond repair. Instead of building an atari joystick from scratch, he looked to a slightly newer generation of gaming and decided to us an NES controller instead. This was done fairly easily with the aide of an Arduino.

This seems like a nice easy mod that could breathe a little new life into some old games, but we just can’t imagine playing without that original joystick!

Filed Under: arduino hacks, tool hacks Tagged With: ,

Wireless controllers for all your retro systems

February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Remember those old wireless controllers made for the consoles of our youth like the NES and Super Nintendo? They didn’t work well, mostly owing to the fact they were built using the same infrared technology that is found in a remote control. Now that all the modern consoles are wireless, [micro] over at the nftgames forum decided to update his classic systems for wireless control.

The transmitters and receivers are built around an nRF24L01+ radio module that operates in the 2.4 GHz band. [micro] has the process of converting his controllers down to a science. He cuts the cord and wires the controller up to an AVR running at 16 MHz. The AVR sends this to the receiver where the button presses are sent through the original controller port. Basically, [micro] recreated a WaveBird controller for his NES, SNES, Saturn and N64.

The controllers are powered by internal lithium batteries, but the charging ICs are too expensive to put in each controller. To solve this problem, [micro] crafted a small external charging circuit that plugs into a 3.5mm jack on each controller. Check out [micro]’s controller demo after the break.

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Filed Under: classic hacks, peripherals hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Playing video games for a college application

February 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As a senior in high school, [Owen] has been waiting to hear from the colleges he applied to for months now. Some of his applications wanted a mid-year report to see if he didn’t come down with senioritis. [Owen] realized these colleges allowed additional materials beyond a high school transcript, so he built a tiny video game that shows his electrical and programming skills.

The Demomite, as [Owen] calls his build, is an amazing piece of work. The entire system is based around an ATtiny2313 with a measly 2kB of program memory. Aside from a graphic LCD from Sparkfun and a repurposed NES controller, there isn’t much else to the build. As a study in minimalism and simplicity, [Owen] gets a big congrats from us.

The entire game fits in the 2kB of flash on the ATtiny, mostly due to coding the entire thing in assembly. You can check out [Owen]’s time-lapse construction video, software demo, and the video he sent to colleges after the break.

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Filed Under: ATtiny hacks Tagged With: ,