SNES-001 Advance Puts Displays In The Controllers

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVis43-Augk&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgU3vgP0Cnw&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5g3Niv1n80&w=470]

11 thoughts on “SNES-001 Advance Puts Displays In The Controllers

  1. 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.

      1. 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.

    1. 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.)

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