nes

205 Articles

Smashed Tablet In NES Case Lives Out Its Days As An Emulator

February 26, 2013 by 25 Comments

smashed-tablet-nes-emulator

The creator of this project started off with a 7″ tablet he received from a coworker. The screen was horribly smashed from one corner spreading out through the entire surface. But the hardware inside still worked, including the HDMI out port. He ended up transplanting the tablet hardware for use as an emulator.

After a bit of sizing up it was determined that the tablet hardware would fit inside the case of a broken NES. The battery would have been a tough fit, but this thing is always going to need to be connected to a television so there’s no need to work without mains power. The back plate was cut down to size and used as a try for mounting the motherboard in the case. Before that step he wired up a USB hub and mounted it so that two ports could be accessed through the original controller port openings.

There’s no details on the software used, but the final image in the gallery shows a game of Starfox being played.

[Thanks Cody]

Building A Better NES

February 9, 2013 by 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 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 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.

Dead NES Controller Used As A Makey Makey Shield

November 22, 2012 by 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.

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The Smallest NES Controller Ever

November 3, 2012 by 24 Comments

A few months ago, [Ben] saw a video of the world’s largest NES controller. “I bet I could make the smallest,” he thought in a strange game of one-upmanship. Now [Ben] has the smallest fully functional NES compatible controller, a feat of engineering that can only end in very, very sore thumbs.

The old NES controller is a very simple device: eight buttons are connected directly to a 4021 shift register. Every time the NES is looking for a change in input, it reads out the data in the shift register and gets the status of all the buttons.

After finding the  smallest footprint 4021 shift register he thought he could solder, [Ben] found some very small SMD push buttons and a very tiny resistor network for the pull ups. The result is tiny, and thanks to the sacrifices of a few NES controller extension cables he found on Amazon, 100% compatible with his old NES.

You can grab all the schematics over on [Ben]’s git. Tip ‘o the hat to [Troy] for sending this one in.

Emulators 101: How To Write A Program That Functions Like An NES CPU

October 12, 2012 by 27 Comments

We’d bet everyone reading this article has played a game on an emulator at some time or another. And you may have a base idea of how those emulators work. But we’d wager the vast majority of you are clueless about the actual implementation of game emulators (we know we are). But that has all changed after seeing this demonstration of how [Bisqwit] wrote his own NES emulator. The description doesn’t cover anything more than the basics of writing code that emulates the NES CPU hardware itself. But it’s presented in such a way that makes it quite easy to understand for anyone who has a basic knowledge of programming. He starts with a switch statement for handling the processor’s opcodes and then moves through piece by piece showing how he refined his code to make it work while keeping it readable. We think this is a great teaching method and appreciate the time he put into producing this tutorial.

The explanation starts about 4:22 into the video which is embedded after the break. You’ll also find the first two demo videos there. Those involve mostly fast-motion text editing of the emulator coding process with some gameplay tests at the end of the second video.

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