Recordable SNES Belt Buckle

February 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

recordable_snes_controller

[Andrew] recently offered to help out a friend who was looking to get her husband a SNES controller belt buckle. Rather than simply slap one together, he decided that it would be far cooler if the belt buckle played audio as well. He gutted a broken SNES controller, removing most everything inside, leaving just the buttons and a few wires.

To allow for the belt buckle to record sounds, he pulled apart a recordable balloon that would play a 10-second audio clip when shaken. He moved around a few wires, allowing for the audio board to be triggered by a button press rather than motion. Once that was done, he went about fitting it into the SNES controller, drilling speaker and microphone holes in the process. With the electronics components all set, he reassembled the controller shell and mounted it to an old belt buckle he had sitting around.

The final product looks extremely fun, and would make any die hard Nintendo fan’s day.

NintendOscope

February 14, 2011 by Kevin Dady 9 Comments

[Craig] has taken his gameboy hackery to the next step, using an oscilloscope as an external display. Back in November of 2010 [Craig] showed us how to extract the video data from a classic gameboy’s screen, armed with that information, and a pretty powerful XMega128A1 controller it seems straightforward to process that data and output it onto a oscilloscope that is in XY(z) mode, especially since he has done all of the hard work for us.

Scopes that feature XY mode typically have a Z input on the back, X controls where the beam is positioned from left to right, Y controls the beam from top to bottom, and Z controls the intensity of the beam. By sweeping the X and Y to act as lines, and Z to control the shade of the beam, its fairly easy to reuse your typically vector display as a raster display similar to televisions or computer monitors (as long as you have your math and timing right), making scopes very useful as output displays for devices like the gameboy, which do not have “standards” friendly display systems.

Join us after the break for a short video, and also check out the scope terminal, or the VGA-to Sope converter for more examples of how to use your oscilloscope as a raster display.

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NESBot Video Game Automation

February 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

nesbot

If you happen to enjoy video games, but don’t actually like playing them, boy do we have the hack for you! [pjgat09] shows us how, armed with an Arduino, you can force a Nintendo to play games by itself, not unlike an old-time player piano. The hack involves programming an Arduino to accept commands mapped out in “movies”, which are actually scripted sets of button presses that one would perform while playing a game. These sorts of scripts are available from TASVideo, a community specializing in “tool assisted” speed runs of video games. These movies are typically used with emulators, so there are some adjustments that need to be made in order to make them work with a console, since the button presses are mapped to each frame that is drawn on the screen. While we are not sure quite how useful this hack is, it is a pretty novel concept. You can see video of the 5-minute SMB speed run after the jump.

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Replace An N64’s Worn Out Joystick

February 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

As gaming consoles age the controllers will inevitably show some wear, and sadly may give out all together. [Kyle] couldn’t bear to watch his Nintendo 64 controller bite the dust so he replaced the thumb stick with one from a PlayStation. This is a bigger job than you might imagine because the two parts are fundamentally different. The original N64 stick uses a rotary encoder to output data to the control chip, while the PlayStation stick is an analog device. [Kyle’s] solution was to read the analog values using a PIC, but lower in the thread you can read about another user who pulled off a similar hack using an AVR. Both convert the signals into the rotary encoder format that the N64 chip is listening for. From the looks of the clip embedded after the break, this couldn’t work any better!

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N64 Advance Portable Gaming System

February 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 20 Comments

n64_advance

Like many people [Kyle] loves the Nintendo 64 and decided he wanted a portable version of his beloved console so he could play games while on the move. One year, two PSOne screens, and three N64 consoles later, his vision is complete. A Game Boy Advance travel case was gutted and used to house the console, hence the “N64 Advance” moniker. Like many others, his project uses a PSOne screen for the display, and a Li-Poly battery pack that provides up to 3.5 hours of playing time. He made sure to include other members of the Nintendo family in his build by adding a pair DS Lite speakers to the mix.

This build also includes some nice “extras” such as having the N64 RAM expansion pack built-in, headphone and A/V out ports (with a screen kill-switch for TV use), and an external controller port that can be used by either the first or second player. Be sure to check out the video of his build after the jump.

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SNES Arcade Controller

January 30, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[Daniel] is making a mini arcade cabinet with an SNES housed inside. He wanted to build an arcade controller for it and chose to construct something from scratch instead of destroying an original piece of hardware. We can almost feel you guys sighing with relief at that one. He sent us some nice photos of his build and pointed out that he’s using one of the Evilmadscientist AVR boards housing an ATtiny2313. The arcade buttons are readily available at sparkfun. The source code for this project is available after the break.

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Backwards Mario

January 23, 2011 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

So you’ve long since mastered Super Mario Bros. and it no longer challenges you? Have you tried playing it from right to left? That’s what Backwards Mario is all about. The first portion of the hack is getting the image to display backwards. He’s working with an old CRT television, which uses a magnetic ring to aim the electron gun at the screen. By swapping the left and right wires from that ring you can flip the image horizontally. Now Mario will be travelling right to left, but the controller buttons will send Mario the wrong direction on screen. This is a snap to fix, just crack open the controller and swap the signals for the left and right buttons. Now it’s time to fall in love with the classic game all over again, just like [JJ’s] doing in the video after the break.

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