If you look closely you’ll notice there’s nowhere to put the game cartridge on this Super Nintendo system. That’s because this is a Rasberry Pi based SNES emulator that plays ROMs, not cartridges. Since the RPi board is used the only limit to what you can play is the board’s RAM and which ROMs you have on the SD card.
The case has basically been gutted and the unused cartridge slot was sealed with some Bondo before painting. In addition to the Rasberry Pi you’ll find a 7-port powered USB hub and a Teensy microcontroller board. The hub allows for the controllers to be connected via USB. The Teensy is recognized as a USB HID device and is used to connect the reset button to a functions on the emulator program. The power switch still works too. To make this happen [MIDItheKID] spliced a USB connector and a microB USB connector to the power switch. We think this draws power from the hub but we’re not 100% sure.
[MIDItheKID] mentions in the Reddit comments that he’s thinking of grabbing that new RPi that has more memory and doing some similar work on his dead PSX.
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Grammar nazi sez it’s “its” not “it’s”
I have to say – a whole teensy for a reset button? Might I suggest a $1 ATtiny45/85 with v-usb instead? Heck, even a controller PCB from a worn out usb joystick could be salvaged for nothing.
I did something similar with a NES, but used the original controller ports and wired the reset button to the GPIO to simulate an ESC key press. Here is a video of it in action
Also, since the Pi has USB, why in heaven would you not just plunk a Retrode or similar in there so that it could play original carts?
I was thinking the same thing when I first saw it.
Then I saw that it costs twice as much as the computer you’d be plugging it into.
So does the mouse, if it’s a halfway decent one :-)
Because I can’t download plastic.
LOL.
a whole teensy for a reset button? Why not use one of the several GPIOs on the RasPi itself? Is it really that hard?
That would probably have taken some extensive modification to the emulator. The Teensy is easy, since it’s pretending to be an input device.
When i did it i just modified an existing driver for the controllers to simulate the Esc key as that is already used to escape the emulators. Then wired it to the GPIO, also it wouldn’t be difficult to create a basic program in C that’s started on boot to do this.
No modification to the emulator. Just a little c program and a script to start on boot. Have the program emulate a keypress based on the GPIO.
Yeah. I tried getting it working with the GPIO pins, but I was limited by my technical knowledge. The teensy provides exactly what I need it for and it was very very simple to program. I have also been considering using more pins on the teensy for save/load state buttons, which I may mount on the back of the system.
Yea, couldn’t he have just wired the switch the the Pi’s system reset bus?
Those cables wrapped around the controller, I can hear them screaming.
but not for long
Since the RPi board is used the only limit to what you can play is the board’s RAM and which ROMs you have on the SD card… which is pretty much all of them.
Lesson to be learned here. Put some effort into your bondo. you can make it look perfect if you put more effort into it. Instead of rushing things. That needed a second skim coat over it then sanded again to make it 100% perfect.
Point taken. This is the first project I’ve ever done like this and the paint job did not come out as well as I wanted. I have recently gotten advice on re-painting that I may take. Use something like “red filler”, some kind of car body filler (it fills up micro-gaps) and then sand with 1000 grit, then re-paint and then use clear lacquer as a coat on top of that followed by a 2000 grit wet sanding. The entire build has been a learning experience, and I look forward to starting more projects and learning more each time.
I have no experience with Bondo. How do you replicate the texture on the plastic?
“I have no experience with Bondo. How do you replicate the texture on the plastic?”
Find some sandpaper that is about the same negative grain that the texture of the existing plastic exhibits, and then lightly press the grain into the Bondo with an appropriate sized flat surface just before it is completely dry. Depending on your Bondo mixture, it might require first being coated with a release agent…
It would be cool to have a little sd card slot where the cartridges would normally plug into.