Building A Better NES

February 9, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 41 Comments

NES

The first model of the NES wasn’t all that great; just ask any one of the millions of six-year-olds who independently discovered blowing on a cartridge made it work. The second NES hardware revision, the top loader, was better but only had RF video output. These are the only two pieces of hardware that can play every single NES game, and even with years of hacking NES-on-a-chip devices, there’s still much to be desired.

[low_budget] over on the AtariAge forum decided he’d had enough of these hardware compromises and decided to build the first new NES hardware revision in 20 years. It’s got all the best features from both of its predecessors and a few new features not seen on any existing NES. There’s support for composite and RGB video generators, new and better amplifiers for the audio, no lockout chip, and a top loading cartridge slot to prevent bent pins on the 72 pin connector.

While [low_budget]’s prototype works, it only does so by salvaging the CPU and PPU from a working NES. There’s still much work to be done on the prototype, but even if we’ll have to destroy our beloved NES, we’d love to get our hands on one of these improved consoles.

DIY NES Controller Makes No Changes To The Design

January 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We like this project for its sheer simplicity. After all, recreating the hardware in the controller for a modern gaming system is next to impossible. [Guillermo A. Amaral B.] had a bunch of parts sitting around and decided to try his hand at recreating an original Nintendo Entertainment System controller.

If you’re not familiar with the electronics inside this brand of retro gaming hardware you might be surprised to find that there’s barely any logic hardware at all. The chip in the middle of the board is a 4021 parallel to serial shift register. It connects to the buttons and uses the clock signal coming through the cable to pulse out the button states over a serial wire. So all that [Guillermo] did was lay out the chip with connects for each button.

In the image above his thumb is obscuring the 5-way switch used for directional control and select (center click). The yellow and green buttons serve as A and B, with the start button on the opposite side of the board due to a mistake in his board layout. He does have some future plans for this. He’s working on a Raspberry Pi project that will monitor and record the controller serial data so that you can play it back. It sounds like a player piano for video games.

Want to see a really small version of this? The same hardware in a smaller package was put together a couple of months ago to build the world’s smallest NES controller.

[via Adafruit]

Stuffing An NES Into An FPGA

January 23, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

megaman_fpga

When the developer of the µTorrent torrent client and the ScummVM LucasArts adventure game interpreter gets bored, something cool is bound to happen. Luckily for us, [Ludde] was a bit listless over Christmas, and with more time than energy to burn, implemented a Nintendo Entertainment System on an FPGA dev board.

The NES was powered by a Ricoh 2A03 CPU, a chip nearly identical to the 6502 found in the Commodore 64s and Apple IIs of the early 1980s. There are a few differences between the two, though: the NES CPU includes an Audio Processing Unit on the chip and is connected to a very cool Picture Processing unit elsewhere on the NES. [Ludde] put all these chips in his Spartan-6 FPGA with a lot of Verilog code.

The rest of the system – the RAM, display output, and controller input comes from the peripherals attached to the FPGA dev board. [Ludde]’s specific board didn’t have a good digital to analog converter, so the composite output was traded for a VGA output. It’s not a completely accurate color pallet, but it’s still an amazing piece of work for someone who was simply bored.

A Gamecube And N64 Console Mashup

January 2, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

[Hailrazer] over on the Made by Bacteria forums was a bit tired of all his consoles cluttering up the space underneath his TV. No worries, though, because it’s actually fairly easy to combine a Gamecube and an N64 into one system that looks very professional.

While [Hailrazer]’s Gamecube was left reasonably complete, not including the addition of a mod chip and SD card to hold Gamecube disk images, the N64 portion of the build required quite a bit of hardware hacking. After finding a Game Boy Advance player for a Gamecube – a neat hardware add-on that allows you to play GBA games on a Game Cube – [Hailrazer] thought he found the perfect enclosure for an N64 case mod.

The guts of the GBA player were thrown out and the guts of an N64 were carefully filed down to fit inside their new home. An Everdrive 64 holds almost every US N64 release on an SD card, making access to the cartridge port unnecessary.

A switch on the side of the Gamecube toggles the video and audio output between the Gamecube and N64. It’s a neat little setup, and packs two consoles into the space of the tiny Gamecube.

Continue reading “A Gamecube And N64 Console Mashup” →

Programming A Game Boy While Playing Pokemon

November 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

We hope our readers are familiar with the vast number of ROM hacks for the original 1st-gen Pokemon games. With certain sequences of button presses, it’s possible to duplicate items in the player’s inventory, get infinite money, or even catch a glimpse of the elusive MissingNo. [bortreb] is familiar with all these hacks, but his efforts to program a Game Boy from inside Pokemon is by far the greatest Pokemon glitch ever created.

This ‘total control’ ROM hack was inspired by [p4wn3r]’s extremely impressive 1 minute and 36 second long speed run for Pokemon Yellow. The technique used in [p4wn3r]’s run relies on the fact the warp points in Pokemon Yellow are right after the item list in the Game Boy’s memory. By corrupting the item list, [p4wn3r] figured out how to make the front door of his house warp directly to the end of the game resulting in the fastest Pokemon speed run ever.

Realizing this ROM hack is able to control the CPU with only the player’s inventory, [bortreb] wanted to see how far he could push this hack. He ended up writing a bootstrapping program by depositing and discarding items from the in-game PC, and was then able to reprogram the Game Boy with a number of button presses on the D-pad, select, start, A and B buttons.

The resulting hack means [bortreb] can actually make Pong, Pacman, a MIDI player, or even a copy of Pokemon Blue. In the video after the break, you can see all of [bortreb]’s speed run along with the finale of playing a MIDI file of the My Little Pony theme song. [bortreb] has a really amazing hack on his hands here that really pushes the definition of what can be done by tinkering around with a Pokemon ROM.

Continue reading “Programming A Game Boy While Playing Pokemon” →

Dead NES Controller Used As A Makey Makey Shield

November 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[Guillermo Amaral’s] NES controller was in great shape. Well, except for the fact that it didn’t work. Upon closer inspection it seems the shift register — which is the only IC on these ancient peripherals — had given up the ghost. But he made it usable again by making the NES controller into a MaKey MaKey shield.

You should remember the MaKey MaKey. It’s a little board that lets you create controllers out of just about anything — bananas being one of the more popular examples. All he needed to do is wire up the controller’s buttons to the board. For the task he chose to use extra long pin headers. To find the location for holes in the case he applied red ink to the top of each pin, then held the PCB up to the outside of the controller. After drilling at each red mark he glued the pin headers in place and started in on the controller’s original circuit board. Once all the point-to-point wiring was done he had a working controller. See for yourself in the clip after the jump.

Continue reading “Dead NES Controller Used As A Makey Makey Shield” →

Tearing Down The Wii U

November 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

With the release of the Wii U last weekend we knew it wouldn’t be long before we saw those glorious gut shots on the Internet. The folks at iFixit have torn down a Wii U, and the insides look somewhat promising for a potential hack to take control of the Wii U Game Pad.

The components in the Wii U console aren’t terribly surprising; a few wireless controllers, HDMI adapters, Flash memory chips, and the IBM Power CPU make up most of the interesting components. The insides of the GamePad, though, look pretty interesting. It appears the Wii U GamePad is powered by an ARM Cortex microcontroller built by STMicroelectronics, but the part numbers for the major ICs on the GamePad board are impervious to Googling.

Of course there’s still the question of how video is transmitted wirelessly from the Wii U console to the GamePad. iFixit found a Broadcom BCM4319XKUBG Wireless module that operates on normal WiFi frequencies. This module has been used in a few other pieces of video gear, most notably the Boxee Box, so there is some possibility of intercepting the video signal transmitted to the GamePad and figuring out the protocol.

The long and short of iFixit’s teardown, at least from the hacker perspective, is that all the interesting parts use hardware similar to what you’d find on any other eminently hackable device. Here’s to hoping we get an open Wii U GamePad before the year is out.