The Raspberry Pi was initially developed as an educational tool. With its bargain price and digital IO, it quickly became a hacker favorite. It also packed just enough power to serve as a compact emulation platform for anyone savvy enough to load up a few ROMs on an SD card.
Video game titans haven’t turned a blind eye to this, realising there’s still a market for classic titles. Combine that with the Internet’s love of anything small and cute, and the market was primed for the release of tiny retro consoles.
Often selling out quickly upon release, the devices have met with a mixed reception at times due to the quality of the experience and the games included in the box. With so many people turning the Pi into a retrogaming machine, these mini-consoles purpose built for the same should have been immediately loved by hardware hackers, right? So what happened?
Some like to garden in their spare time, while others prefer to smoke cigars or fold complicated origami figurines. Security researcher [grifter] [CTurt] seems to enjoy cracking consoles instead, and had a go at exploiting the Nintendo 64 over an obscure modem interface.
The 1990s were a wild time, where games shipped in cartridges. This format opened up crazy possibilities to add additional hardware to the cartridge itself. Perhaps most famously, Nintendo packed in the SuperFX chip to enable 3D graphics on the Super Nintendo. Later on, the N64 game Morita Shogi 64 shipped with an entire telephone modem in the cartridge itself. The resulting exploit is therefore dubbed “shogihax”.
Armed with a dodgy GameShark and a decompiler, [CTurt] set to work. Through careful parsing of the code, they were able to find a suitable overflow bug in the game when using the modem. Unlike more pedestrian savegame hacks, this not only allowed for the execution of arbitrary code but also the modem interface means that it’s possible to continually stream more data to the console on an ad-hoc basis.
It’s a great hack that takes advantage of a relatively accessible cartridge, rather than relying on more obscure hardware such as the N64DD modem or other rarities. We’ve seen other N64 homebrew hacks before, too. Video after the break.
In the beginning, there was hot glue. Plus some tape, and a not inconsiderable amount of Bondo. In general, building custom portable game consoles a decade or so in the past was just a bit…messier than it is today. But with all the incredible tools and techniques the individual hardware hacker now has at their disposal, modern examples are pushing the boundaries of DIY.
This Zelda: Ocarina of Time themed portable N64 by [Chris Downing] is a perfect example. While the device is using a legitimate N64 motherboard, nearly every other component has been designed and manufactured specifically for this application. The case has been FDM 3D printed on a Prusa i3, the highly-detailed buttons were printed in resin on a Form 3, and several support PCBs and interface components made the leap from digital designs to physical objects thanks to the services of OSH Park.
A custom made FFC to relocate the cartridge port.
Today, those details are becoming increasingly commonplace in the projects we see. But that’s sort of the point. In the video after the break, [Chris] breaks down the evolution of his portable consoles from hacked and glued together monstrosities (we mean that in the nicest way possible) to the sleek and professional examples like his latest N64 commission. But this isn’t a story of one maker’s personal journey through the ranks, it’s about the sort of techniques that have become available to the individual over the last decade.
Case in point, custom flexible flat cables (FFC). As [Chris] explains, when you wanted to relocate the cartridge slot on a portable console in the past, it usually involved tedious point-to-point wiring. Now, with the low-volume production capabilities offered by companies like OSH Park, you can have your own flexible cables made that are neater, faster to install, and far more reliable.
Projects like this one, along with other incredible creations from leaders in the community such as [GMan] are changing our perceptions of what a dedicated individual is capable of. There’s no way to be sure what the state-of-the-art will look like in another 5 or 10 years, but we’re certainly excited to find out.
When the Game Boy Advance came on the scene in 2001, it was a pretty big deal. The 32-bit handheld represented the single biggest upgrade the iconic Game Boy line had ever received, not only in terms of raw processing power, but overall design. It would set the state-of-the-art in portable gaming for years, and Nintendo was eager to get developers on board.
Which could explain why the official GBA development kit, recently shown off by [Hard4Games], looks like something that was built in a hackerspace. It’s pretty common for console development systems to look more like boxy 1990s computers than the sleek injection molded units that eventually take up residence under your television, but they don’t often come in the form of a bare PCB. It seems that Nintendo was in such a rush to get an early version of their latest handheld’s guts out to developers that they couldn’t even take the time to get a sheet metal case stamped out for it.
The development board doesn’t like later GBA games.
All of the principle parts of the final GBA are here, and as demonstrated in the video after the break, the board even plays commercially released games. Though [Hard4Games] did find that some titles from the later part of the handheld’s life had unusual graphical glitches; hinting that there are likely some low-level differences that don’t manifest themselves unless the developer was really digging deep to squeeze out all the performance they could.
The board also lacks support for Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, though this is not wholly surprising. When an older game was inserted into a GBA, the cartridge would physically depress a switch that enabled a special 8080-based coprocessor that existed solely for backwards compatibility. Adding that hardware to a development board would have made it more expensive and added no practical benefit. That said, [Hard4Games] does point out that there appears to be a unpopulated area of the board where the backwards compatibility switch could have been mounted.
Hackers have always been enamored with the Game Boy, so it’s fitting to see that the official development kit for the final entry into that storied line of handhelds looked a lot like something they could build themselves. If anyone feels inclined to build their own “deconstructed” GBA in this style, you know where to find us.
The Switch is Nintendo’s latest home console, which has forever blurred the line between handhelds and consoles you plug in to your TV. It does both! Typically, hooking up to a screen is done through the dock, but that wasn’t quite cool enough for [sturm]. He took a NES and turned it into a tidy Switch dock instead!
The build starts with an original NES shell, which is gutted of its original hardware. The PCB from the original dock is installed, and a slot cut in the top of the NES to allow the Switch to be inserted. Naturally, there’s a spring flap reminiscent of the Super NES to keep the dock looking clean when not in use. When it is installed, a series of cables and bezels break out the USB ports to the original controller ports on the NES.
It’s a tidy build that brings a touch of nostalgia to the modern console. We’re sure an official version would sell like hotcakes, too. There’s plenty of similarly inspired builds for the Switch, with the Gamecube Joycons a particular highlight!
While the Nintendo GameCube stood deep in the shadows of the PS2 in its day, its controller remains a popular target for all sorts of modifications today — many of them involving LEDs, thanks to a translucent bottom and button option. As an avid player of the Super Smash Bros. series, [goomysmash] is of course an owner of the very same controller, which motivated him to write GoomWave, a “versatile and hackable LED library”. In an impressively detailed Instructable, he shows how to modify your own controller in two different ways to make use of the library for yourself.
Initially inspired by the Shinewave mod that lights up RGB LEDs in colors associated to pre-defined moves in Smash Bros, [goomysmash] aimed to improve on it and add more versatility from the very beginning. Its latest iteration comes in a simplified ABXY-buttons-only variety using an ATtiny85, and a full-blown all-button variety using an Arduino Nano. Both of them are powered straight from the controller board, and have different modes where they either react to controller interactions, or are just custom lights. A brief showcasing of all the different modes can be seen in the video after the break, and there a few more details also in an older version’s video, also embedded below.
Mesmerizing LED-blinking aside, we just have to admire the diligence and cleanliness [goomysmash] put into the wiring and fitting everything inside the controller. But in case light mods aren’t your thing or you’re looking for other GameCube controller modifications, how about adding Bluetooth?
While Valve’s Steam Controller ultimately ended up being a commercial flop, most users agreed its use of touch-sensitive pads in place of traditional analog joysticks or digital directional buttons was at least a concept worth exploring. Those same touchpad aficionados will likely be very interested in this modification by [Matteo Pisani], which replaces the analog joystick on a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con with a capacitive touch sensor.
As [Matteo] explains in his detailed write-up, the initial inspiration for this project was to create a permanent solution to joystick fatigue and drifting issues. He reasoned that if he removed the physical joystick completely, there would be no way for it to fail in the future. We’re not sure how many people would have taken the concept this far, but you can’t argue with the logic.
The original joystick is a fairly straightforward device, comprised of two analog potentiometers and a digital button. It’s connected to the Joy-Con’s main PCB with a 0.5 mm pitch flexible cable, so the first step for [Matteo] was to spin up a breakout for the cable in KiCad to make the development process a bit easier.
The board design eventually evolved to hold an Arduino Pro Mini, a digital potentiometer, and a connector for the circular touchpad. The Arduino communicates with both devices over I2C, and translates the high resolution digital output of the touch controller into an analog signal within the expected ranges of the original joystick. [Matteo] says he still has to implement the stick’s digital push button, but thanks to an impressive 63 levels of pressure sensitivity on the pad, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Now that he knows the concept works, the next step for [Matteo] is to clean it up a bit. He’s already working on a much smaller PCB that should be able to fit inside the Joy-Con, and we’re very interested in seeing the final product.
