[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive data from the DS lite as shown in the example videos after the break. The data access is made possible by making the Arduino look like a controller that the DS is happy to talk to.
There’s a warm place in our hearts for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s too bad we don’t have that hardware sitting around anymore. But if you do there’s a chance it needs some TLC and there’s always room for a blue LED mod. [Raph] has a wonderful collection of NES hardware repairs and hacks that you should take a look at. These include replacing the power supply, fixing the cartridge connector, monkeying with the CIC chip, adding a reset button on the controller, converting the audio from mono to stereo, and yes, swapping in a blue LED. Oh, and as a side note, [Raph] gets a bit of extra hacker ‘cred for including “coded manually using VIM” at the bottom of his page. Classic.
[Segher] has reverse engineered the hardware and command set for the NES CIC chips. These chips make up the security hardware that validates a cartridge to make sure it has been licensed by Nintendo. Only after authentication will the console’s CIC chip stop reseting the hardware at 1 Hz. The was no hardware information available for these chips (go figure) so [Segher] had to do some sleuthing with the tools at hand which include some rom dumps from the chip pairs. He was nice enough to share his findings with us. We’re betting they’re not of much use to you but we found it an interesting read.
[Thank ppcasm]
[Photo credit: Breaking Eggs and Making Omelets]
[Spatula Tzar] Turned on her NES one day to find it no longer working. Off went the case and out came the oscilloscope. After probing around for a bit, she found that one of the RAM chips was very hot. She hot aired off the bad chip implementing an “Impenetrable Aluminum Heat Shield of Science” to protect the rest of the components. In the chip’s place she soldered a wide DIP socket for which the NES engineers had thoughtfully left a place. Then, using a 128Mbit SRAM SOIC, she soldered it to 0.100″ headers to fit in the socket. As the original chip was only 16Mbit, unused address lines are tied high or low. The console is now fully functional again. Also checkout the comments on Oldschool NES ‘repair’ how-to.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB6vSHDDdhI]
We really love this version of super mario brothers that [Brad] is putting together. It is played on an 8×8 RGB LED screen, powered by a pic microprocessor. There aren’t many details on the construction or code yet, but we expect he’ll publish it soon. We’re guessing it is very similar to his other 8×8 game system. If you really want to get a jump start, he has published some great tutorials on working with pic microprocessors.
[via instructables]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzW0JAx2lFM]
Some may think that linking an Xbox 360 controller to an original NES console is overkill. [Francois] would not count him self among that group. When the robotics team at his school was done using the controller with one of their projects, [Francois] used a Cortex M3 processor to get it to run with one of Nintendo’s 8-bit consoles. Part of the code for using the controller with the robot and the NES is available. Now all that is left is being able to play Duck Hunt with a Sixaxis controller.
[Sprite_tm] has whipped up yet another interesting tutorial – software-based this time. He basically describes how he connected his Wiimotes to an HTPC. A USB Bluetooth receiver, and a little bit of Linux scripting, was all that was necessary to get the system up and running. To add to the fun, [Sprite_tm] configured a the controllers to work with MAME (an arcade machine emulator), allowing one to play Duck Hunt on a computer in its full glory!
