GBA Remote Play Upgrade Lets You Play PlayStation On The Bus

November 22, 2021 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

The Nintendo Game Boy Advance was basically the handheld gaming situation of its era, by virtue of the fact that it had no serious competitors in the market. The system was largely known for 2D games due to hardware limitations.

However, [Rodrigo Alfonso] has recently upgraded his GBA Remote Play system that lets him play PlayStation games and others on his classic Game Boy Advance. We first featured this project back in July, which uses a Raspberry Pi 3 to emulate games and pipe video data to the handheld for display, receiving button presses in return.

Since then, [Rodrigo] has given the project some upgrades, in the form of a 3D-printed case that mounts a battery-powered Pi directly to the back of the console for portable play. Additionally, overclocking the GBA allows for faster transfer rates over the handheld’s Link Port, which means more pixels of video data can be clocked in. This allows for more playable frame rates when running at 240×160, the maximum resolution of the GBA screen.

The result is a Game Boy Advance which you can use to play Crash Bandicoot on the bus just to confuse the normies. Of course, one could simply build a Raspberry Pi handheld from scratch to play emulated games. However, this route takes advantage of the GBA form factor and is pretty amusing to boot. Video after the break.

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A Nintendo 64 console with modern hardware internals

N64 Mini PC Conversion Includes All The Trimmings

November 18, 2021 by Chris Wilkinson 8 Comments

We’ve seen quite a few retro gaming consoles physically modded to house modern emulation hardware, but the NUC-64 by [RetroModder] stands out as one of the most impressive Nintendo 64 guttings that we’ve seen to date.

Observed from the front, the NUC-64 almost resembles a stock Nintendo console. The project’s name is printed across the vestigial cartridge slot, and two suspiciously modern wireless networking antennas can be seen poking out from the back. The console’s modifications are fully revealed when looking at it from the rear – gone is the power brick socket, which now houses the I/O for the replacement motherboard. A custom 3D printed I/O shield keeps everything looking neat and tidy.

Internally, the new hardware is no slouch. The Intel NUC is a small-form-factor PC, and this miniature battlestation sports an 1.6GHz Intel N3700 Pentium processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity and an M.2 SSD. This hardware runs circles around the original Nintendo 64, and is more than capable of emulating games from that system.

Most total conversions would call it a day here, however [RetroModder] has taken it a step further by producing a custom PCB that neatly ties together the console’s front I/O. Most importantly, two Mayflash N64-to-USB converters means that your favorite 1990s games can be enjoyed with the original controllers. The original power LED and reset switch are present, as is the sliding power switch which retains its original purpose, thanks to a simple 555 circuit that sends the expected power-on and power-off signals to the motherboard with each slide of the power switch. Additionally, a system of 3D printed mounts and brackets keeps everything secure inside the case.

All the build details can be found here. The NUC-64 follows on from last month’s GamecubePC. The build quality and attention to detail makes this conversion rather special, and it’s clear that a lot of care and planning was taken to pull this off. Hopefully the original N64 hardware can be repurposed as well, perhaps as a new portable console?

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Cramming A DS Inside A Gameboy

November 16, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 4 Comments

Many holiday recipes and console hacks share a common theme: cramming a thing inside another thing. Whether it’s turducken or a Nintendo DS inside a Gameboy, the result is always unexpected. The chassis for this mod is a humble Gameboy color with a Gameboy SP screen tackled on the top to serve as the secondary display. Unfortunately, this mod lost touch screen functionality, limiting some of the games you can play.

[TheRetroFuture] received the custom handheld from [GameboyCustom], which was somewhat damaged in shipping. The original screw mounts had to be removed and the case glued back together to fit the DS motherboard. So for [TheRetroFuture] to get inside to start troubleshooting involved a razor blade and patience. Testing various points and swapping components got [TheRetroFuture] closer to the root problems. The fix ended up being a few wires that came loose during shipping. Finally, after reseating a display connection and some careful soldering, it booted and started playing games.

Overall, it’s pretty impressive to see Mario Kart DS running on both screens on the tiny handheld. But you might be asking, why? Why shove one handheld inside another handheld? Sometimes it’s to gain new functionality like this Raspberry Pi inside a PSP body. Sometimes, it’s just because we can. Video after the break.

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Hacked Punch-Out Controlled With Actual Punches

November 10, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 6 Comments

In a slightly safer departure away from jetpack roller-skating and flinging around bolts of lightning, [Ian Charnas] has been hacking retro video games. After a lot of hard work [Ian] has managed to add pose estimation to control the character in the NES boxing game “Punch-Out.” Surely he can’t get hurt doing that? No, but since it wasn’t fair to hurt the poor suffering characters, without taking any damage himself, he added electric-shock feedback to give the game a bit more, ahem, punch. See, you can get hurt playing video games!

By starting with Google MoveNet, which is a pre-baked skeletal tracking model which can run in a browser using TensorFlowJS, he defined some simple heuristics for the various boxing moves usually performed with the game controller. Next, he needed to get the game. Being a all-round good guy, [Ian] bought an original copy of the game cartridge to obtain the license, then using the USB CopyNES from RetroUSB, dumped out the game binary for the next step.

Emulation of the NES hardware was chosen, taken care of by FCEUX, in order to run the game and the posture model on the same machine. This simplified the control of the game, since it would be somewhat more work to have it run on the original NES. By using emscripten, FCEUX was cross-compiled to WebAssembly, and so both the game and control side are both in the land of JavaScript. To be honest, after playing the game a little, [Ian] found it far too fast to be playable with posture control, as opposed to much faster button pressing, so some game hacking was required. Emulation made this much easier.

It took [Ian] around two months of disassembling the game binary, and figuring out the game logic around the characters in order to slow them down enough to make it playable, but he did manage it. You can be the judge, since he bought a bunch more cartridges to unlock more license copies, you can play it too. Just don’t add the electric-shock part, nobody needs to be administered electric shock therapy from a two inch high bright orange Mike Tyson!

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the conversion from hynix SRAM to FRAM on a Pokemon Yellow PCB

Pokemon Time Capsule

November 8, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 17 Comments

The precious Pokemon we spent hours capturing in the early nineties remain trapped, not just by pokeballs, but within a cartridge ravaged by time. Generally, Pokemon games before the GameBoy Advance era had SRAM and a small coin cell to save state as NVRAM (Non-volatile random access memory) was more expensive. These coin cells last 10-15 years, and many of the Pokemon games came out 20 years ago. [9943246367] decided to ditch the battery and swap the SRAM for a proper NVRAM on a Pokemon Yellow cartridge, 23 years later.

The magic that makes it work is a FRAM (ferroelectric random access memory) made by Cypress that is pin-compatible with the 256K SRAM (made by SK Hynix) on the original game cartridge PCB. While FRAM data will only last 10 years, it is a write-after-read process so as long as you load your save file every 10 years, you can keep your Pokemon going for decades. For stability, [9943246367] added a 10k pull-up on the inverted CE (chip enable) pin to make sure the FRAM is disabled when not in use. A quick test shows it works beautifully. Overall, a clever and easy to have to preserve your Pokemon properly.

Since you’re replacing the chip, you will lose the data if you haven’t already. Perhaps you can use [Selim’s] Pokemon Transporter to transport your pokemon safely from the SRAM to the FRAM.

Adding Wireless Charging To The Switch Lite

October 13, 2021 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

The Nintendo Switch is a monstrously popular machine, and it’s had no difficulty raking in the bucks for the Japanese gaming giant, but there’s no denying that it’s technologically a bit behind the curve. Until the long-rumored “Pro” version of the Switch materializes, industrious gamers like [Robotanv] will simply have to make up for Nintendo’s Luddite ways by hacking in their own upgraded hardware.

In this case, [Robotanv] wanted to add Qi wireless charging to his Switch Lite. He figured that if all of his other mobile devices supported the convenient charging standard, why not his portable gaming system? Luckily, the system already supports the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C, so finding an aftermarket Qi receiver that would connect to it was no problem. He just needed to install it into the handheld’s case.

After liberating the Qi receiver from its protective pouch enclosure to get it a bit thinner, [Robotanv] taped it to the inside of the system’s case and ran thin wires to the rear of the USB-C port. As luck would have it, Nintendo was kind enough to put some test pads for the power pins right behind the port, which made for an ideal spot to connect the charger.

At first he only connected the positive and negative lines from the charger, but quickly realized he also had to connect the CC pin to get the juice flowing. After that, it was just a matter of buttoning the system back up. All told, it looks like a pretty simple modification for anyone who’s not bashful about taking a soldering iron to their $199 console.

We’ve seen these Qi receivers retrofitted into devices before, and it remains an excellent way to add the feature not only to commercial products, but to your own projects.

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Mouse And Keyboard Controls On The N64

October 1, 2021 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

The Nintendo 64 was one of the consoles that properly heralded in the era of 3D gaming. However, its controller is of a design we wouldn’t consider ideal today. For the FPS games that were so popular on the N64, a mouse and keyboard could do much better. [The Hypocaust] set out to make it happen.

The N64 polls the controller and receives button and analog stick data in return. Four bytes are sent by the controller, with 14 bits covering the buttons and 8 bits covering the horizontal and vertical axes of the analog stick, respectively. Thus, if keyboard presses and mouse movements from a PC could be pumped to a microcontroller which reformatted the data into signals the N64 could understand, everything would work nicely.

Initial attempts to get things working with code borrowed from a [James Read] faced an issue of a 3-second lag between keypresses and actions reaching the N64. Upgrading to a faster microcontroller only made things worse, taking the lag out to a full 16 seconds. The problem? The code borrowed for the project was storing keypresses in a buffer that was creating the delay. Once eliminated, the system worked.

An installer for the software is available, but you’ll have to be comfortable with running a strange executable if you want to use it. We’ve seen similar work before too, such as the USB64 project. Video after the break.

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