The SF1 Mini Is A Homebrew Version Of An Obscure Nintendo Console

July 8, 2022 by Robin Kearey 3 Comments

The Super NES is arguably the best known console of the 16-bit era. It typically came in the form of a grey box with either grey or purple buttons, and an angular or streamlined design, depending on whether you lived in North America, Europe or Asia. Compact and mini versions followed later, but there were also a few lesser-known models released during the SNES’s heyday in the early 1990s. One of these was the Sharp SF1: a CRT television with a built-in Super Nintendo. The cartridge slot was located at the top, with the controllers connecting at the front. The internal video connection even provided better image quality than a typical SNES setup.

The SF1 was never sold outside Japan and is quite rare nowadays. But even if you can find one, the bulky CRT will take up a lot of space in your home. [Limone] therefore decided to build himself a smaller replica instead. His “SF1 mini” comes in a 3D printed case that holds a 5.5″ TFT screen, stereo speakers, and connections for game paks and game pads.

Thankfully, [Limone] didn’t sacrifice an original SNES to make this project: instead, he used a DIY Super Nintendo kit developed by a company called Columbus Circle. This kit contains a modern replica of a SNES motherboard and is intended for custom builds like this. However, the layout of the motherboard didn’t match [Limone]’s intended design, so he desoldered several components and re-attached them using a huge web of magnet wire. An RGB-to-HDMI converter connects the SNES’s video output to the TFT screen and provides for remarkably sharp graphics.

[Limone] explains the build process in detail in the video embedded below (in Korean, with English subs available). We’ve seen a couple of neat SNES replicas, some small and some particularly tiny, but this has to be the first SF1 replica.

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Raspberry Pi Pico “Modchip” Unlocks The GameCube

July 5, 2022 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

In terms of units sold, it’s no secret that the GameCube was one of Nintendo’s poorest performing home consoles. You could argue increased competition meant sales of the quirky little machine were destined to fall short of the system’s legendary predecessors, but that didn’t keep the Wii from outselling it by a factor of five a few years later. Still, enough incredible games were released for the GameCube that the system still enjoys a considerable fanbase.

Now, with the release of PicoBoot by [webhdx], we suspect the GameCube is about to gain a whole new generation of fans. With just a Raspberry Pi Pico, some jumper wires, and a widely available third-party SD card adapter, this open source project bypasses the console’s original BIOS so it can boot directly into whatever homebrew application the user selects. With how cheap and easy to perform this modification is, we wouldn’t be surprised if it kicked off something of a renaissance for GameCube homebrew development.

In the video after the break, [Tito] of Macho Nacho Productions provides a rundown of this new project, including a fantastic step-by-step installation guide that covers everything from soldering the jumper wires to the console’s motherboard to getting the firmware installed on the Pico. He then demonstrates booting the console into various community developed front-ends and tools, showing just how versatile the modification is. While some will see this as little more than an easier way to run bootleg games, we can’t help but be excited about what the future holds now that getting your own code to run on the system is so easy.

Alright, maybe it’s not so easy. To solder on the five wires that will eventually snake their way to the GPIO pins of the Pi Pico, you’ll need to strip the console all the way down to the main board. That wouldn’t be too bad itself, but unfortunately to reach two of the connections you’ll need to remove the system’s massive heatsink — which means you’ll need to clean up the old sticky thermal pads and apply new ones if you don’t want your GameCube to turn into a GameCrisp. It’s nothing that would scare off the average Hackaday reader, but it might give pause to those less handy with an iron.

The release of PicoBoot comes hot on the heels of the revelation that the Raspberry Pi Pico can be used not only as an N64 flash cart but as a supercharged PlayStation Memory Card. These projects would all be significantly improved with a custom RP2040 board, and no doubt that’s the direction they’ll eventually head, but it’s hard not to be impressed by what the low-cost microcontroller development board is capable of in its native form. Especially now that it comes in WiFi flavor.

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What Do You Get When A Raspberry Pi Pico Flashes A Nintendo 64

June 24, 2022 by Jenny List 16 Comments

The joke was when the Nintendo 64 first hit the streets around a quarter century ago, that the 64 in the name referred not to the technology on board, but to the excessive cost of the cartridges. Whatever the truth in that, it’s something now completely laid to rest by [Konrad Beckmann] with his Nintendo 64 flash cart powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico (Nitter Link).

The schematic is surprisingly simple, in that the Pico does everything required to both interface to the N64 and to an SD card to hold the software. The clever work is done by the RP2040 firmware, which can be found along with the hardware details in the “develop” branch of the project’s GitHub repository. And while the earliest version was a Raspberry Pi Pico with a host of jumper wires, the more polished version focuses on a custom PCB and bare RP2040 chip.

Perhaps the N64 hasn’t received the attention it should have over the years, overshadowed as it was by its competitors such as the original PlayStation, but it’s projects like this one which remind us that there’s still life in Nintendo’s ’90s flagship. Speaking of which, if you were on Team Sony back in the day but still want to put your Pi Pico to use, check out this DIY PlayStation Memory Card we covered recently.

Optimized Super Mario 64 Offers Exciting Possibilities

April 21, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 13 Comments

When working on any software project, the developers have to balance releasing on time with optimizations. As long as you are hitting your desired time constraints, why not just ship it earlier? It’s no secret that Super Mario 64, a hotly anticipated launch title for the Nintendo 64 console in 1996, had a lot of optimizations left on the table in order to get it out the door on time. In that spirit, [Kaze Emanuar] has been plumbing the depths of the code, refactoring and tweaking until he had a version with serious performance gains.

Why would anyone spend time improving the code for an old game that only runs on hardware released over two decades ago? There exists a healthy modding community for the game, and many of the newer levels that people are creating are more ambitious than what the original game could handle. But with the performance improvements that [Kaze] has been working on, your budget for larger and more complex levels suddenly becomes much more significant. In addition, it’s rumored that a multi-player mode was originally planned for the game, but Nintendo had to scrap the feature when it was found that the frame rate while rendering two cameras wasn’t up to snuff. With these optimizations, the game can now handle two players easily.

Luigi has been waiting 26 years for his chance to shine.

[Kaze] has a multi-step plan for improving the performance involving RAM alignment, compiler optimizations, rendering improvements, physics optimizations, and generally reducing “jankiness.” To be fair to the developers at Nintendo, back then they were working with brand new hardware and pushing the boundaries of what home consoles were capable of. Modeling software, toolchains, compilers, and other supporting infrastructure have vastly improved over the last 20+ years. Along the way, we’ve picked up many tricks around rendering that just weren’t as common back then.

The central theme of [Kaze]’s work is optimizing Rambus usage. As the RCP and the CPU have to share it, the goal is to have as little contention as possible. This means laying out items to improve cachability and asking the compiler to generate smaller code rather than faster code (no loop unrolling here). In addition, certain data structures can be put into particular regions of memory that are write-only or read-only to improve resource contention. Logic bugs are fixed and rendering techniques were improved. The initial results are quite impressive, and while he isn’t done, we’re very much looking forward to playing with the final product.

With the Nintendo 64 on its way to becoming a mainline-supported Linux platform, the old console is certainly seeing a lot of love these days.

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Fix Every Broken Via To Return This Game To Life

April 5, 2022 by Jenny List 11 Comments

We all know the havoc that water in the wrong place can do to a piece of electronics, and thus we’ve probably all had devices damaged beyond repair. Should [Solderking] have thrown away the water-damaged PCB from a Nintendo Pokemon Ruby cartridge? Of course he should, but when faced with a board on which all vias had succumbed to corrosion he took the less obvious path and repaired them.

Aside from some very fine soldering in the video below the break there’s little unexpected. He removes the parts and tries a spot of reworking, but the reassembled board doesn’t boot. So he removes them again and this time sands it back to copper. There follows a repair of every single vial on the board, sticking fine wires through the holes into a sponge and soldering the top, before turning it over and fixing the forest of wires on the other side. Fixing the ROM results in a rather challenging fitment involving the chip being mounted at an angle and extra wires going to its pads, which demonstrates the value in this story. It’s not one of monetary value but of persevering with some epic rework to achieve a PCB which eventually boots. Of course a replacement board would make more sense. But that’s not the point, is it?

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Solving Grounding Issues On Switch Audio

March 27, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 32 Comments

Grounding of electrical systems is an often forgotten yet important design consideration. Issues with proper grounding can be complicated, confusing, and downright frustrating to solve. So much so that engineers can spend their entire careers specializing in grounding and bonding. [Bsilvereagle] was running into just this sort of frustrating problem while attempting to send audio from a Nintendo Switch into a PC, and documented some of the ways he attempted to fix a common problem known as a ground loop.

Ground loops occur when there are multiple paths to ground, especially in wires carrying signals. The low impedance path creates oscillations and ringing which is especially problematic for audio. When sending the Switch audio into a computer a loop like this formed. [Bsilvereagle] set about solving the issue using an isolating transformer. It took a few revisions, but eventually they settled on a circuit which improved sound quality tremendously. With that out of the way, the task of mixing the Switch audio with sources from other devices could finally proceed unimpeded.

As an investigation into a nuisance problem, this project goes into quite a bit of depth about ground loops and carrying signals over various transforming devices. It’s a great read if you’ve ever been stumped by a mysterious noise in a project. If you’ve never heard of a ground loop before, take a look at this guide to we featured a few years ago.

Nintendo Switch Runs Vita Software With Vita2hos

March 6, 2022 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Good news for fans of PlayStation Vita — a new project from [Sergi “xerpi” Granell] allows users to run software written for Sony’s erstwhile handheld system on Nintendo’s latest money printing machine, the Switch. To be clear, there’s a very long road ahead before the vita2hos project is able to run commercial games (if ever). But it’s already able to run simple CPU-rendered Vita homebrew binaries on the Switch, demonstrating the concept is sound.

Running a Vita CHIP-8 emulator on the Switch. Credit: Modern Vintage Gamer

On a technical level, vita2hos is not unlike WINE, which enables POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS, and BSD to run Windows programs so long as they use the same processor architecture. Since the Switch’s ARM v8 processor is capable of executing code compiled for the Vita’s ARM v7 while running in 32-bit compatibility mode, there’s no emulation necessary. The project simply needs to provide the running program with work-alike routines fast enough, and nobody is the wiser. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done.

According to the project page, the big hurdle right now is 3D graphics support. As you could imagine, many Vita games would have been pushing the system’s graphical hardware to the limit, making it exceptionally difficult to catch all the little edge cases that will undoubtedly come up when and if the project expands to support commercial titles. But for homebrew Vita games and utilities that may not even utilize the system’s 3D hardware, adding compatibility will be much easier. For instance, it’s already able to run [xerpi]’s own CHIP-8 emulator.

[xerpi] provides instructions on how to install vita2hos and the Vita executable to be tested onto an already hacked Nintendo Switch should you want to give it a shot. But unless you’ve got experience developing for the Vita or Switch and are willing to lend a hand, you might want to sit this one out until things mature a bit.

Thanks to [NeoTechni] for the tip.