NESPoise – A Nice Looking NES Clone

December 21, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 9 Comments

[Dave] tipped us about the latest project he just finished: a posable, desktop NES clone arcade machine. This idea came to be when its creator gathered a few bits and pieces he had lying around: an NES Retro Entertainment System (Retrobit RES, found for less than $25) and an arcade stick with its buttons. [Dave] then bought a 7″ car DVD screen (less than $40) and started a first standard arcade-looking design with OpenSCAD. As the first draft was relatively boring, he let it mature for a bit until he got another idea, shown in the picture above.

The final result is made of 3D printed PLA and varnished luaun plywood which gives the console a VCS style retro look. Many hours were required to 3D print the different parts using a Makerbot Replicator 2. [Dave] disassembled his Retrobit RES to layout its parts inside the case and also replaced the original voltage regulator with a 7805 on a big heatsink. This may be one of the best ‘nintendo’ hacks we have received over the years, but there have been others that also take cartridges.

Wireless SNES Controller For Logitech Receiver

November 19, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

SNES

A while back, Logitech introduced their version of a wireless interface for keyboards, mice, and other human-oriented peripherals. Yes, they could have used Bluetooth, but that’s neither here nor there. What we do know, though, is that it’s now possible to stuff one of these Logitech transmitters into a Super Nintendo controller, allowing it to operate with your fancy-schmancy wireless keyboards and mice.

[Warrior_Rocker] wanted to retain as much of the stock appearance of the original controller as possible. To do this, he salvaged the Logitech transmitter from an old handheld Logitech keyboard/touchpad combo. The membrane of the keyboard connected directly to the transmitter, meaning tracing out the connections of the membrane to each pin was required to get a button mapping that made sense.

Once the lines of the SNES controller were wired up to the transmitter, [Warrior] needed a way to power his new wireless controller. The old keyboard used a pair of AA cells wired in parallel. With two AA cells, the keyboard had about a year of battery life, so with a single AAA cell, [Warrior]’s SNES controller should last a few months or more.

Except for a switch and a missing cable, [Warrior]’s wireless controller looks exactly like a stock controller. Pretty impressive, given this build is the product of stuff he just had lying around.

Original NES Advantage Controller Stuffed With Clone NES

November 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

famiclone-inside-NES-advantage

Like all good hackers [Osgeld] makes regular appearances at the thrift store to scavenge for raw materials. This summer he was lucky enough to come across a couple of NES clone games. These are controllers that emulate the original Nintendo Entertainment System by connecting to a television using composite video. The mechanics of the controllers were pretty much shot, but he knew he could do something with the boards inside. It was a small gamble at a dollar apiece anyway.

As you can see above, he upgraded a vintage NES Advantage controller by stuffing it full of the emulator hardware. To start he disassembled the arcade-like peripheral and gave everything a thorough cleaning. Since he was going to be soldering onto the PCBs anyway he upgraded the controller by swapping out the original switches for a different set of tactile switches. The large base provided plenty of room for [Osgeld] to fit the emulator (with included ROMs) and now he’s Playing with Power.

The NES Advantage is a very nostalgic controller. Even the Ghostbusters hacked on it!

Finding Shiny Pokemon Automatically

November 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

In case you’re not up to speed with the world of Pokemon, nearly every species of this game’s titular creatures have a ‘shiny’ variety – a differently colored sprite for each pokemon. As far as gameplay goes, they’re exactly the same as their non-shiny brethren, but the shiny varieties are so impossibly rare not many players have seen them. [dekuNukem] over on Youtube has come up with a great way to find these shiny Pokemon automatically with the Hackaday reader’s favorite tools – an Arduino and a few parts from Sparkfun.

The build hinges on the fact that all shiny pokemon have a short animation whenever the player encounters them in the wild. This setup uses a fishing rod, so an Arduino Micro first presses the Y button to cast the rod, while the ‘duinos ADC listens to the audio signal until a bite is indicated.

A light sensor taped to the bottom screen of the 3DS then measures the amount of time the screen is blacked out. The extra animation for every shiny pokemon means this blackout period is about half a second longer. If the Arduino doesn’t see a shiny, it ‘runs away’, but if a shiny is detected a buzzer sounds to tell the extremely lazy pokemon trainer they have a shiny on their line.

From the video, it took about 36 minutes to find a single shiny pokemon, and about 8 shinies in the three hours of testing this rig has under its belt.

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Aluminum Unibody Nintendo 64

October 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

NES1

[Travis] wanted us to take a look at his N64 portable to see if it could be featured on Hackaday. By the looks of it, we’re going to say hell yeah. Everything on this portable N64, down to the buttons, is milled from aluminum. It’s an amazing build that raises the bar of what a portabalized game system can be.

Inside this anodized enclosure is the circuit board from an original N64. To cut down on the size, [Travis] milled a new heat sink for the CPU and GPU. All the games – quite possibly all the games ever released for the N64 – are stored on an SD card and accessed through an EverDrive 64. Two 5000 mAh Lipo batteries provide three hours of play time on a beautiful high-res screen.

What’s even more amazing is that [Travis] machined all the parts on an exceedingly small, manual mini-mill. Truly a portabalized console for the ages.

You can check out a gallery of pics [Travis] sent in and his demo video below.

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Keyboard Spoofs 4 NES Controllers For Chiptune Goodness

October 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

NES-keyboard

This toy keyboard is being used to play music on an NES. As you probably already know, the hardware inside those original controllers was dead simple. They’re just a parallel to serial shift register that reads from all of the keys. To get this keyboard up and running [heavyw8bit] simply mounted eight chips inside the gutted toy, connecting two of them to the keyboard keys, and the rest to the array of push buttons he added to the right.

So what’s the point of using this as a quadruple game controller? Are you expecting to see what a full speed-run of Contra looks like using this as the controls? That’s not the point at all. This becomes a musician-friendly frontend for the NES synthesizer ROM called NESK-1. [heavyw8bit] wrote the game/program in order to allow you to use the original console hardware to play all of the sounds you know and love. Our favorite is the arpeggio example heard at about 2:35 into the clip after the break.

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How The Game Genie Works

October 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Those of us old enough to remember blowing into cartridges will probably remember the Game Genie – a device that plugs in to an NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, or Game Boy that gives the player extra lives, items, changes the difficulty, or otherwise modifies the gameplay. To someone who doesn’t yet know where the 1-up is in the first level of Super Mario Bros., the Game Genie seems magical. There is, of course, a rhyme and reason behind the Genie and [The Mighty Mike Master] put together a great walkthrough of how the Game Genie works.

There are two varieties of Game Genie codes – 6-character codes and 8-character codes. Both these types of codes translate into a 15-bit address in the game ROM (from 0x8000 to 0xFFFF for the 6502-based NES) and a data byte. For the 6-character codes, whenever the address referenced by the Game Genie code is accessed, a specific data byte is returned. Thus, infinite lives become a reality with just a 6-character code.

Some games, especially ones made in the late years of their respective systems, use memory mapping to increase the code and data provided on the cartridges. Since areas of data are constantly being taken in and out of the CPU’s address space, merely returning a set value whenever a specific address is accessed would be disastrous. For this bank-switching setup, the Game Genie uses an 8-bit code; it’s just like the 6-bit code, only with the addition of a ‘compare’ byte. Using an 8-bit code, the Game Genie returns a specific byte if the compare bytes are equal. Otherwise, the Genie lets hands off the original data to the CPU.

Of course, all this information could be gleaned from the original patent for the Game Genie. As for the circuitry inside the Game Genie, there’s really not much aside from an un-Googleable GAL (general array logic) and a tiny epoxied microcontroller. It’s an amazingly simple device for all the amazement it imbued in our young impressionable minds.

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