Emulator In NES Cartridge – So Clean It Looks Factory Made

nesP_NES-emulator-in-game-cartridge

We extend our congratulations to [airz] over at the ben heck forums. He put together a mod that fits an emulator into an original NES cartridge and utilizes a butchered original NES controller; and he did an amazing job!

He is using a cheap but full featured emulator board. It comes with 4 gigs of memory but also has an SD card slot. NES, Game Boy, and Game Boy color ROMs can all be played on the 2.8″ color LCD but the system also features a TV out connector for use with a larger screen as well.

The cuts that [airz] made in the case are amazing, easily eclipsing the last cartridge emulator mod we saw. The holes for the controls look as if the plastic was molded that way. For realism he also cut off the PCB interface on the business end of the cartridge and glued it in place. Apparently it took three cartridges, two controllers, and two of the emulators to make it this nice, but if you want to make an omelet…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXPfznWLPU]

[via Gizmodo]

36 thoughts on “Emulator In NES Cartridge – So Clean It Looks Factory Made

  1. Anybody have an idea of how much a portable emulator like that runs? Or is it a media player with a hacked firmware? He doesn’t provide much detail about the actual hardware used. :-(

  2. Seems that Super Mario Bros is running about 15% fast; you can tell from the pitched-up music, which is run by the main CPU on an NES. Tetris, however, is running at the correct speed.

    Any idea why? It could be he was accidentally ran the PAL version of SMB, and the emulator always runs everything at NTSC speed. That would make for a 16.6% speed increase.

  3. He backed out of Tetris because he used the “L” block wrong, he needed to nudge it to the left one spot. Any of us who had grown up playing that would have never made such a classic newb mistake. Still a nice hack, even if the music on Mario was a little hyped up.

  4. @Kyle, Those Mario bros./Duck Hunt cartridges shipped with every single NES sold for a while so they aren’t exactly a rare commodity, and I didn’t see anything that said he didn’t use ones that were already malfunctioning in some way. I know I’ve got some faulty NES equipment that I just couldn’t bring myself to throw out, which are going to become one of these.

  5. @sneakypoo

    No doubt, he didn’t even use the B button? Looks like he isn’t even comfortable with the controller.. Alas I must be old as it is the controller that I gauge all others against..

    Very Cool None the less

  6. Airz, is there any way I can contact you I would love to take on this mod project please contact me or is there a link with full instructions and parts list I am confident I can build this if I have all of the correct parts I would love to do this and have a camera function as well.

  7. Startropics is one of the Most underplayed games on NES. It’s an AMAZING game yet so few of people have ever heard of it. I’m currently building a PiGrrl zero into an nes cartridge. So far so good.

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