Cleanest Rasberry Pi NES Mod

[ModPurist] sent us his Raspberry-Pi-in-a-Nintendo casemod. Before you go hitting the back button, this is a good one because it’s so well executed. And it’s actually a two-fer: he’d previously built up a wireless NES controller that completes the setup.

7058802Both of these mods are hacks in the purest sense of the word. The controller mod took a wireless keyboard’s sending circuit board and wedged it inside the NES controller. The original NES controller reads out the buttons into a shift register and sends that down a wire. That’s all gone. [ModPurist] just wired up each button to the sender PCB and figured out which keys they corresponded to on the PC by pressing the buttons. Simple.

The best part of his video about building the controller? After about a minute in, he forgets that he’s filming a technical how-to video and plays Pokemon for the remaining four minutes. That’s the sign of success.

Then there’s the NES hack itself. He stripped everything out, added a Raspberry Pi 2 and a fan, made it all work with the power switch and the original TV outs, and it’s done. Again, nothing more than needs doing, but nothing less. It looks just right plugged up to the CRT monitor (from a C64, no less), and there’s no doubt that being able to play wirelessly on an original NES controller is cool.

This isn’t [ModPurist]’s first time here on Hackaday either, and his “Cold Boy” fridge-turned-Gameboy is a work of art.


18 thoughts on “Cleanest Rasberry Pi NES Mod

      1. Thank you for the reply. That’s a relief because i’m want something silent for my living room. Now i will certainly put a Pi in a stylish Nintendo shell but i’ll probably just hook up a wireless USB keyboard

    1. I run some raspberry pis in much smaller cases than this and don’t include ventilation. Currently the one on my desk is running at 44C, the one in the shop is 46C. I would say no, a fan is not needed.

    2. If you have several cases lying around you should give/sell them to people trying to fix or restore their consoles. Yellowing SNES cases in particular are a real problem in the community.

      1. You wouldn’t see the LED until you press power. And you dont press power until after you put the cart in. I wouldn’t say a green power LED that is a very good indicator that it does not accept carts.

        1. Maybe I should improve it by putting an RGB led in, and when the cart door is opened, make it go nuts! or a siren, hmm, ideas. to be honest, I thought it was a red LED, since it ran red, till I put a resistor on it to keep it from blowing, and found out it wasnt red. I will probably switch it eventually, but I didnt before doing the video.

  1. Has anyone ever done like a ‘SuperCatridge’? Like, rather than gutting out the NES and replacing it with an Emulator, replace the cartridge with something that could supply any Rom to the original hardware?

  2. I hope he spends the time to actually set up a button that sends a shutdown command to the pi otherwise he’s going to have a hold lot of fun fixing his SD cards due to hard shutdowns of the PI

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