Twenty years ago, [Downing] would fight with his siblings over who got to watch TV. Obviously, this gave him the idea of putting a television inside his Super Nintendo controller, but at he tender age of 12, [Downing] had neither the experience nor skills to make that happen. Now that he’s older, and much less impressed by the Sega Nomad, [Downing] made his dream a reality.
Reading over [Downing]‘s madebybacteria forum thread, he began the build by adding two controller ports and painting the system a classic Famicom red and white. The prominent feature of [Downing]‘s design – a display in each controller – are connected to the console through a second pair of SNES controller ports. Internally, the video signal generated by the SNES is broken out to each controller; the controller displays are just a small mirrored version of whats sent to the TV.
Like [Downing]‘s previous Genesis portable, the SNES-001 is a master work of Bondo and vacuum forming. After the break you can see a few demos of what this console mod can do.
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This is definitely something every kid though about in the late 80s early 90s when mom, dad, bor/sis wanted to watch something on the main T.V. and you had to either quickly find a save point or cold-turn off the console.
Awesome build.
thought* – bro*
** We really need an EDIT function here HAD!
i still want that for the xbox30, because my girlfriend is only good at handheld gaming
*waits for comments about joysticks to roll in*
This is a nitpick, but it would’ve been boss to pass the video signal through a metal sleeve around the controller plug, rather than using a second plug.
In fact, the snes controllers have two unconnected pins. Could’ve repurposed those.
That was my first thought actually, however a few problems came into play. 1. The open ports had no wires in the controller so I would have had to run extra cables anyway or use a PS Controller cable and 2. The original jacks are on a PCB inside the SNES which I believe were just ground pins, however connecting right too them would have caused issues and would have been a bitch to get around. 3. I still needed three lines, Audio, Video and Power. I could have tapped off the ground easily enough and been fine, but there still were not enough free spaces to make it work.
Wii U:SNES EDITION
haha on engadget now. BALLER YO
Hey Brian, thanks for writing this up! It seems to have caught on all over the place now so I very much appreciate it!
My guess as to why the console reset when you plugged the controller in is a power sag. I would consider adding caps across the power rail in the console, and maybe using a beefier power supply (Or modified: do sneses use 7805s? If they do, you could use a beefy 5v supply instead, and not be limited by the 7805s current capacity.)