Bringing Achievements To The Nintendo Entertainment System

Microsoft made gaming history when it developed Achievements and released them with the launch of the Xbox 360. They have since become a key component of gaming culture, which similar systems rolling out to the rest of the consoles and even many PC games. [odelot] has the honor of being the one to bring this functionality to an odd home—the original Nintendo Entertainment System!

It’s actually quite functional, and it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. What [odelot] created is the NES RetroAchievements (RA) Adapter. It contains a Raspberry Pi Pico which sits in between a cartridge and the console and communicates with the NES itself. The cartridge also contains an LCD screen, a buzzer, and an ESP32 which communicates with the Internet.

When a cartridge is loaded, the RA Adapter identifies the game and queries the RetroAchievements platform for relevant achievements for the title. It then monitors the console’s memory to determine if any of those achievements—such as score, progression, etc.—are met. If and when that happens, the TFT screen on the adapter displays the achievement, and a notification is sent to the RetroAchievements platform to record the event for posterity.

It reminds us of other great feats, like the MJPEG entry into the heart of the Sega Saturn.

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Ultra-Wide Gaming Handheld Channels The Nintendo DS

“The Nintendo DS isn’t wide enough!” said nobody, ever. Most players found Nintendo’s form factor to be perfectly acceptable for gaming on the go, after all. Still, that doesn’t mean a handheld gaming rig with a more… cinematic aspect ratio couldn’t be fun! [Marcin Plaza] built just that, with great results.

The initial plan was to build a Steam Deck-like device, but using laptop trackpads instead of joysticks. [Marcin] had a broken Lenovo Yoga 730-13 to use as the basis for the build. That caused the plan to diverge, as the only screen [Marcin] could find that was easily compatible with the laptop’s eDP interface was an ultrawide unit. From there, a clamshell enclosure was designed specifically to rehouse all the key components from the Lenovo laptop. The top half of the clamshell would hold the screen, while the base would feature a small custom keyboard, some buttons, and the aforementioned trackpad. This thing reminds us of the Nintendo DS for multiple reasons. It’s not just the clamshell design—it’s the fact it has a touch control on the lower deck, albeit without a screen.

It’s an original concept for a handheld gaming device, and it makes us wish there were more games built for the ultrawide aspect ratio. This is one project that has us browsing the usual websites to see just what other oddball screens are out there… round screens in a makeup compact clamshell, anyone? Video after the break.

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Tearing Down Nintendo’s Alarmo Alarm Clock

All your Nintendo Alarmo are belong to mew~ (Credit: GaryOderNichts, Blogspot)

Most of us will probably have seen Nintendo’s latest gadget pop up recently. Rather than a Switch 2 announcement, we got greeted with a Nintendo-branded alarm clock. Featuring a 2.8″ color LCD and a range of sensors, it can detect and respond to a user, and even work as an alarm clock for the low, low price of €99. All of which takes the form of Nintendo-themed characters alongside some mini-games. Naturally this has led people like [Gary] to buy one to see just how hackable these alarm clocks are.

As can be expected from a ‘smart’ alarm clock it has 2.4 GHz WiFi connectivity for firmware and content download, as well as a 24 GHz millimeter wave presence sensor. Before [Gary] even had received his Alarmo, others had already torn into their unit, uncovering the main MCU (STM32H730ZBI6) alongside a 4 GB eMMC IC, as well as the MCU’s SWD pads on the PCB. This gave [Gary] a quick start with reverse-engineering, though of course the MCU was protected (readout protection, or RDP) against firmware dumps, but the main firmware could be dumped from the eMMC without issues.

After this [Gary] had a heap of fun decrypting the firmware, which seems to always get loaded into the external octal SPI RAM before execution, as per the boot sequence (see featured image). This boot sequence offers a few possibilities for inserting one’s own (properly signed) contents. As it turns out via the USB route arbitrary firmware binaries can be loaded, which provided a backdoor to defeat RDP. Unfortunately the MCU is further locked down with Secure Access Mode, which prevents dumping the firmware again.

So far firmware updates for the Alarmo have not nailed shut the USB backdoor, making further reverse-engineering quite easy for the time being. If you too wish to hack your Alarmo and maybe add some feline charm, you can check [Gary]’s GitHub project.

A Look Inside The Super Nintendo Cartridges And Video System

Despite being effectively sold as a toy in the 1990s, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was pretty bleeding-edge as far its computing chops were concerned. This was especially apparent with its cartridges, such as in this excellent summary article by [Fabien Sanglard].

In addition to the mask ROM that stored the game data and (optionally) battery-backed SRAM to store save data, a wide range of enhancement processors existed that upgraded the base SNES system with additional processors for more CPU performance, enhanced graphics and so on. Imagine sticking a game cartridge in a PlayStation 4 today that boosted CPU speed by 5x and gave it a much better GPU, this was the world of SNES games.

On the other side of the video game cartridges was the video output system, which seems easy enough in today’s world of digital HDMI and DisplayPort output. In the 90s video output did however mean NTSC and SECAM/PAL, which means playing nice with frequencies, different resolutions (lines) and squeezing as much as possible into a single frame in a way that works with the game console’s rendering pipeline. As a result of this the PAL version of Super Mario World has a larger vertical resolution than the NTSC version (240 vs 224 lines), even if it’s still squashed into the same 4:3 format. For the physical video output side, European gamers were spoiled with an AV connector to (RGB) SCART output, while the rest of the world dealt with some variety of RF composite or S-video.

Although the SNES’s successor in the form of the N64 would not take cartridges to the same extremes, it was this flexible architecture that gave the SNES such an amazing game library.

Yuzu And Citra Emulators Shut Down After Legal Pressure From Nintendo

In a move that came rather like a surprise to many, the company behind the well-known Switch and 3DS emulators Yuzu and Citra – Tropic Haze LLC – as reported by PC Gamer has shutdown both projects and associated websites as part of a US$2.4M settlement with Nintendo with a last message left on the Yuzu website. This comes in the wake of Nintendo suing Tropic Haze LLC over the Yuzu emulator, claiming that there’s ‘no lawful way to use Yuzu’, as it requires files extracted from a real Switch device to decrypt game files. Although Citra is not part of the lawsuit, it being made by the same developers seems to have resulted in it getting axed along with Yuzu as collateral damage.

What makes this issue so legally hairy is that even though an emulator by itself isn’t illegal, requiring proprietary firmware and keys already gets one into contested territory about the legality of dumping said files from a console, even if you own it. This was already an issue with the first Playstation emulators, which require the Playstation BIOS image to even boot, but left the emulator developers mostly untouchable. What seems to have set off Nintendo’s lawyers here would seem to be the way that the Yuzu developers leaned into the copyright infringement (often incorrectly called ‘piracy’) angle, giving Nintendo’s legal team enough exposed flesh to launch a ballistic legal strike.

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Mapping The Nintendo Switch PCB

As electronics have advanced, they’ve not only gotten more powerful but smaller as well. This size is great for portability and speed but can make things like repair more inaccessible to those of us with only a simple soldering iron. Even simply figuring out what modern PCBs do is beyond most of our abilities due to the shrinking sizes. Thankfully, however, [μSoldering] has spent their career around state-of-the-art soldering equipment working on intricate PCBs with tiny surface-mount components and was just the person to document a complete netlist of the Nintendo Switch through meticulous testing, a special camera, and the use of a lot of very small wires.

The first part of reverse-engineering the Switch is to generate images of the PCBs. These images are taken at an astonishing 6,000 PPI and as a result are incredibly large files. But with that level of detail the process starts to come together. A special piece of software is used from there that allows point-and-click on the images to start to piece the puzzle together, and with an idea of where everything goes the build moves into the physical world.

[μSoldering] removes all of the parts on the PCBs with hot air and then meticulously wires them back up using a custom PCB that allows each connection to be wired up and checked one-by-one. With everything working the way it is meant to, a completed netlist documenting every single connection on the Switch hardware can finally be assembled.

The final documentation includes over two thousand photos and almost as many individual wires with over 30,000 solder joints. It’s an impressive body of work that [μSoldering] hopes will help others working with this hardware while at the same time keeping their specialized skills up-to-date. We also have fairly extensive documentation about some of the Switch’s on-board chips as well, further expanding our body of knowledge on how these gaming consoles work and how they’re put together.

Running UNIX On A Nintendo Entertainment System

Who wouldn’t want to run a UNIX-like operating system on their NES or Famicom? Although there’s arguably no practical reason for doing so, [decrazyo] has cobbled together a working port of Little Unix (LUnix), which was originally written for the Commodore 64 and 128 by [Daniel Dallmann]. The impetus for this project was initially curiosity, but when [decrazyo] saw that someone had already written a UNIX-like OS for the 6502 processor, it seemed apparent that the NES was too similar to the C64 to not port it.

Much of this is relatively straightforward, as the 6502 MPU in the C64 is nearly identical to the Ricoh 2A03 in the NES, with the latter missing the binary-coded decimal support, which is not a crucial feature. The only significant roadblock was the lack of RAM in the NES. The console has a mere 2 KB of RAM and 2 KB of VRAM, which made it look anemic even next to the C64. Here, a Japan-only accessory came to the rescue: the Famicom Disk System (FDS), which is a proprietary floppy disk-based system that slots into the bottom of the Famicom and was used for games as well as storing saves back in the day.

By using a Famicom with FDS, it was possible to gain an additional 32 kB provided by the FDS, making the userspace utilities available in the shell. The fruits of this labor work well enough that he could also pop it up on an EverDrive cartridge that supports FDS ROMs and boot it up on an unmodified NES. Whether this is cooler than the NES-OS, which we covered previously, is up for debate.

Incidentally, [Maciej Witkowiak] seems to have resumed development on LUnix, with a new release in 2023, so maybe UNIX-on-6502 may see a revival after a few decades of little happening.

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