A Masterpiece Of 3D Printed Case Modding. With An Ouya.

April 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

We’ve seen a few of [Downing]’s portabalized console builds before, but this one is his first build in over two years. That’s a lot of time, and since then he’s picked up a lot of great fabrication techniques, making this one of the best looking portables we’ve ever seen. It’s a repackaging of an Ouya, but we won’t hold that against him, it’s still an amazing piece of work.

In the build log, [Downing] started off this build by using a 3D printed enclosure, carefully milled, filled, and painted to become one of the best one-off console repackagings we’ve ever seen. The speaker and button cutouts were milled out, and an amazing backlit Ouya logo completes the front.

Stuffing the Ouya controller inside a case with a screen, battery, and the console itself presented a challenge: there is no wired Ouya controller. Everything is over Bluetooth. Luckily, the Bluetooth module inside each controller can be desoldered, and slapped on a small breakout board that’s stuffed in the case.

It’s a great build, and in [Downing]’s defense, the Ouya is kinda a cool idea. An idea much better suited to a handheld device, anyway. Videos below.

Continue reading “A Masterpiece Of 3D Printed Case Modding. With An Ouya.” →

Portable PS2, Courtesy Of Cross Plane

October 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

It’s not exactly a portable, but [Downing]’s PS2 advance puts all the power of a Playstation 2 in the palm of your hands, all while being more popular that the Vita.

For the audio and video, the project uses a Cross Plane, a project from a slightly unsuccessful Kickstarter [Downing] pulled the plug on last month. When the handheld is plugged in to the Cross Plane, all the audio, video, and controller wires are transferred through a pair of cables, with the possible addition of wireless transmission should [Downing] ever want to revisit this project.

In deciding on what to use for a case, [Downing] had bought a few AG cases from Polycase but found the ergonomics severely lacking. Putting two of the case backs together, he found the resulting structure was actually very comfortable, and with a few simple modifications to add some holes for acorn nuts,

It’s a great looking project that really highlights [Downing]’s talents as a console modder. He’s also thrown his hat into the Hackaday Trinket contest by engraving the Jolly Wrencher into the back of his project, which unfortunately isn’t seen in the video below.

Continue reading “Portable PS2, Courtesy Of Cross Plane” →

Handheld Console Build-off

October 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

The above pic isn’t a new Wii U controller from Nintendo – it’s the product of the 2013 Portable Build-Off Challenge over at the Made By Bacteria forums. Every year the Bacman forums hold a contest to build the best portabalized console, and like every year this year’s entries are top-notch.

One of the more interesting projects this year is a handheld PlayStation 2 put together by [Gman]. It uses a PS2 Slim motherboard and a dualshock 2 controller along with a 4-inch screen to stuff an entire PS2 into a convenient handheld gaming device. [Gman] ditched the CD drive and opted to play games off the USB drive, a clever substitution that really reduces the size and power consumption.

In our humble opinion, the best looking console mod is the one shown above by [Bungle]. It’s a portable GameCube stuffed inside a handmade case with a WiiKey Fusion that allows games to be played off an SD card. It’s an amazing build, and we can only hope [Bungle] will make a few molds of his case.

The entire contest has an incredible display of console modding expertise, and is well worth a look.

SNES-001 Advance Puts Displays In The Controllers

June 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Twenty years ago, [Downing] would fight with his siblings over who got to watch TV. Obviously, this gave him the idea of putting a television inside his Super Nintendo controller, but at he tender age of 12, [Downing] had neither the experience nor skills to make that happen. Now that he’s older, and much less impressed by the Sega Nomad, [Downing] made his dream a reality.

Reading over [Downing]’s madebybacteria forum thread, he began the build by adding two controller ports and painting the system a classic Famicom red and white. The prominent feature of [Downing]’s design – a display in each controller – are connected to the console through a second pair of SNES controller ports. Internally, the video signal generated by the SNES is broken out to each controller; the controller displays are just a small mirrored version of whats sent to the TV.

Like [Downing]’s previous Genesis portable, the SNES-001 is a master work of Bondo and vacuum forming. After the break you can see a few demos of what this console mod can do.

Continue reading “SNES-001 Advance Puts Displays In The Controllers” →

The Most Portable GameCube Ever

May 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Here’s the smallest GameCube we’ve seen, straight from the fruitful workbench of [lyberty5] over on the ModRetro forums. Even though we’ve seen disc-less GameCubes before, [lyberty5] puts this project together so well it wouldn’t look out-of-place in the Nintendo product lineup.

Unlike most of the other portable GameCubes we’ve seen, [lyberty5]’s build doesn’t have a disk drive. The games are loaded off an SD card with the help of a Wiikey Fusion, a small FPGA’d device that replaces the CD drive in GameCubes and Wiis with an SD card.

The enclosure was constructed out of vacuum formed plastic with the always popular ‘dremeling and bondoing a controller for proper button placement’ method. Inside the enclosure is the hacked up GameCube, a 3.5 inch screen capable of displaying NTSC video at 640×480 resolution and enough battery power to get two or three hours of playtime from a single charge.

After the break you can check out [lyberty5] fast-paced demo video that really sets the bar for portablized console presentation.

Continue reading “The Most Portable GameCube Ever” →