Discontinued Nintendo Consoles And Raspberry Pis

Nintendo has discontinued a Classic gaming console. It’s a pity, yes, but with the release of Nintendo’s new gaming console, they probably have bigger fish to fry. That doesn’t mean these discontinued Nintendo consoles will die a slow, miserable death locked away in a closet; at least one of them will live on with the heart of a Raspberry Pi.

This is a project [Liam] has been working on since 2012, just after he got the first edition of the Raspberry Pi. While some people were figuring out how to stuff the Pi inside a Nintendo Entertainment System or a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, [Liam] decided to embed the Pi inside a console of a more recent vintage: the Nintendo GameCube.

The first phase of this project was simply to get the Pi running inside the enclosure of the non-working GameCube he picked up. The power supply in this console was well designed, and after a quick perusal through some online documentation, [Liam] found a stable 5V with enough amps to power the Pi. After ripping out the internals of this console with the help of a quickly hacked together ‘Nintendo screwdriver’, [Liam] had a perfectly functional Pi enclosed in a Nintendo chassis.

Time marches on, and after a while, the Raspberry Pi 2 was released. By this time, retro emulation was hitting the big time, and [Liam] decided it was time for an upgrade. He disassembled this Nintendo console again, routed new wires and inputs to the original controller ports, and used a Dremel to route a few holes for the HDMI and SD card slot.

With the addition of a few SNES-inspired USB controllers, RetroPi, and a few ROMs, [Liam] has a wonderful console full of classic emulation goodness, packaged in an enclosure Nintendo isn’t making any more.

24 thoughts on “Discontinued Nintendo Consoles And Raspberry Pis

    1. This just in Man empties out a room and Installs a ATXm motherboard kitted out with 2tb of SSD 32gb of DDR4 with a 8 core CPU, onto one wall in a 2 story 1970s styled house, Turning this house into a computer that can emulate a mainframe that even mimics the size of a mainframe AMAZING, Now lets look at pictures…..

    1. Tired, nobody’s forcing you to read the Raspberry Pi articles. If you don’t like them, don’t read them! Your negative comments certainly don’t add anything of value.

    2. First off, I am pretty damn sure HaD didn’t create the PI or Arduino, so they aren’t ‘hocking their crappy…’ anything!
      Secondly, 10 million Pis can’t be wrong and probably a lot more than that for the Arduinos. I would love to see your board that you created selling that many and where I can buy it?
      Third, you are more than welcome to POUND SAND!

  1. On a similar note, I’m using a case from a Sun Model 811 external SCSI drive for my Raspberry Pi powered media server.

    Plenty of power on the 5V side for the Pi and drive, and the fans are powered from the 12v side.

  2. My favorite retrofits are turning DVD players to computers for people.
    everythings from BIG 100 cd jukebox with I7s to little orange PIs for Ubuntu PCs In little cases.
    Love it and have made a few dollars doing it.
    Right now more people are asking for the Orange Pi with 2 gig ram and 16gb of EMMC.
    They seem to play Most of the Movies good till you start getting up to the 4k moves, Not so good then.
    But Good little Motherboards starting at $40. and having your new/old equipment to match your existing equipment, every one seams to like it.
    This is working out great for me.
    I have not done a Nintendo Entertainment System yet.

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