snes

106 Articles

Adding Bluetooth To Original SNES Controllers

October 10, 2018 by 14 Comments

There’s a bunch of companies selling wireless Super Nintendo style controllers out there. You can go on Amazon and get any number of modern pads that at least kinda-sorta look like what came with Nintendo’s legendary 1990’s game console. They’ve got all kinds of bells and whistles, Bluetooth, USB-C, analog sticks, etc. But none of them are legitimate SNES controllers, and for some people that’s just not good enough.

[sjm4306] is one of those people. He wanted to add Bluetooth and some other modern niceties to a legitimate first-party SNES controller, so he picked up a broken one off of eBay and got to work grafting in his custom hardware. The final result works with Nintendo’s “Classic Edition” consoles, but the concept could also work with the original consoles as well as the computer if you prefer your classic games emulated.

A custom ATMEGA328P-powered board polls the controller’s SPI serial shift register in much the same way the original SNES would have. It then takes those button states and sends them out over UART with a HC-05 Bluetooth module. The controller is powered by a 330 mAh 3.7V battery, and a charging circuit allows for easily topping the controller off with a standard USB cable.

A particularly nice touch on the controller is the use of custom light pipes for the status LEDs. [sjm4306] made them by taking pieces of transparent PLA 3D printer filament, heating and flattening the end, and then sanding it smooth. This provides a diffusing effect on the light, and we’ve got to say it looks very good. Definitely a tip to file away for the future.

On the receiving side, this project was inspired by a custom NES Classic Edition Advantage controller we featured last year, and borrows the work creator [bbtinkerer] did to get his receiver hardware talking to the Classic console over I2C.

We’ve seen a number of projects which have added wireless functionality to the classic Super Nintendo controller, but most tend to be more invasive than this one. We like the idea of reading the controller’s original hardware rather than completely gutting it.

Continue reading “Adding Bluetooth To Original SNES Controllers” →

Dumping A Zelda SNES ROM, And Learning A Few Things Along The Way

August 31, 2018 by 12 Comments

For many of us, being given a big old DIP ROM from nearly thirty years ago and being told to retrieve its contents would be a straightforward enough task. We’d simply do what we would have done in the 1980s, and hook up its address lines to a set of ports, pull its chip select line high, and harvest what came out of the data lines for each address.

But imagine for a minute that an old-fashioned parallel ROM is a component you aren’t familiar with, as [Brad Dettmer] did with the ROM from a SNES Zelda cartridge. We’ve seen plenty of reverse engineering stories with ancient computing gear as their subject, but perhaps it’s time to accept that some of the formerly ubiquitous devices are edging towards that sort of status.

So [Brad] takes us through the process of using the Saleae logic analyser to interrogate the chip while an Arduino stepped through its address lines, and the lesson is probably that while it seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut it is important to factor in that unfamilarity. If you’d never worked with a 1980s ROM, it would make sense to use the tool you are familiar with, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. While we’re on the subject of Nintendo ROMs, have a read about extracting the boot ROM from a cloned Game Boy.

PC In An SNES Case Is A Weirdly Perfect Fit

August 18, 2018 by 20 Comments

For better or for worse, a considerable number of the projects we’ve seen here at Hackaday can be accurately summarized as: “Raspberry Pi put into something.” Which is hardly a surprise, the Pi is so tiny that it perfectly lends itself to getting grafted into unsuspecting pieces of consumer tech. But we see far fewer projects that manage to do the same trick with proper x86 PC hardware, but that’s not much of a surprise either given how much larger a motherboard and its components are.

So this PC built into a Super Nintendo case by [NoshBar] is something of a double rarity. Not only does it ditch the plodding Raspberry Pi for a Mini-ITX Intel i5 computer, but it manages to fit it all in so effortlessly that you might think the PAL SNES case was designed by a time traveler for this express purpose. The original power switch and status LED are functional, and you can even pop open the cart slot for some additional airflow.

[NoshBar] started by grinding off all the protruding bits on the inside of the SNES case with a Dremel, and then pushed some bolts through the bottom to serve as mounting posts for the ASUS H110T motherboard. With a low profile Noctua CPU cooler mounted on top, it fits perfectly within the console’s case. There was even enough room inside to add in a modified laptop charger to serve as the power supply.

To round out the build, [NoshBar] managed to get the original power slider on the top of the console to turn the PC on and off by gluing a spring-loaded button onto the side of the CPU cooler. In another fantastic stroke of luck, it lined up almost perfectly with where the power switch was on the original SNES board. Finally, the controller ports have been wired up as USB, complete with an adapter dongle.

[NoshBar] tells us the inspiration for sending this one in was the Xbox-turned-PC we recently covered, which readers might recall fought back quite a bit harder during its conversion.

Reverse-Emulating NES: Nintendception!

May 31, 2018 by 32 Comments

This is a stellar hack, folks. [Tom7] pulled off both full-motion video and running a Super Nintendo game on a regular old Nintendo with one very cute trick. And he gives his presentation of how he did it on the Nintendo itself — Nintendo Power(point)! The “whats” and the “hows” are explained over the course of two videos, also embedded below.

In the first, he shows it all off and gives you the overview. It’s as simple as this: Nintendo systems store 8×8 pixel blocks of graphics for games on their ROM cartridges, and the running program pulls these up and displays them. If you’re not constrained to have these blocks stored in ROM, say if you replaced the cartridge with a Raspberry Pi, you could send your own graphics to be displayed.

He demos a video of a familiar red-haired English soul-pop singer by doing just that — every time through the display loop, the “constant” image block is recalculated by the Raspberry Pi to make a video. And then he ups the ante, emulating an SNES on the Pi, playing a game that could never have been played on an NES in emulation, and sending the graphics block by block back to the Nintendo. Sweet!

The second video talks about how he pulled this off in detail. We especially liked his approach to an epic hack: spend at least a day trying to prove that it’s impossible, and when you’ve eliminated all of the serious show-stoppers, you know that there’s a good chance that it’ll work. Then, get to work. We also learned that there were capacitors that looked identical to resistors used in mid-80s Japan.

These are long videos, and the first one ends with some wild speculation about how a similar human-brain augmentation could take a similar approach, replacing our “memories” with computed data on the fly. (Wait, what?!? But a cool idea, nonetheless.) There’s also another theme running through the first video about humor, but frankly we didn’t get the joke. Or maybe we just don’t know what’s funny. Comments?

None of that matters. A SNES game was played in an NES by pushing modified graphics from a “ROM” cartridge in real-time. And that’s awesome!

If you want more Nintendo-in-Nintendo goodness, check out this NES ROM that’s also a zip file that contains its own source code. If you compile the source, you get the zip file, which if you unzip gives you the source to compile. Right?

Continue reading “Reverse-Emulating NES: Nintendception!” →

Homebrew SNES Mini Aims For Historical Accuracy

November 15, 2017 by 8 Comments

While “normies” are out fighting in the aisles of Walmart to snap up one of the official “Classic Mini” consoles that Nintendo lets slip out onto the market every once and awhile, hackers have been perfecting their own miniature versions of these classic gaming systems. The “Classic Mini” line is admittedly a very cool way to capitalize on nostalgic masses who have now found themselves at the age where they have disposable income, but the value proposition is kind of weak. Rather than being stuck with the handful of generation-limited games that Nintendo packed into the official products, these homebrew consoles can play thousands of ROMs from systems that stretch across multiple generations and manufacturers.

But for those old enough to remember playing on one of these systems when they first came out, these modern reincarnations always lack a certain something. It never feels quite right. That vaguely uncomfortable feeling is exactly what [ElBartoME] is aiming to eliminate with his very slick miniature SNES build. His 3D printed case doesn’t just nail the aesthetics of the original (PAL) console, but the system also uses real SNES controllers in addition to NFC “cartridges” to load different ROMs.

The project’s page on Thingiverse has all the wiring diagrams and kernel configuration info to get the internal Raspberry Pi 3 to read an original SNES controller via the GPIO pins. He also gives a full rundown on the hardware and software required to get the NFC-enabled cartridges working with EmulationStation to launch the appropriate game when inserted. Though he does admit this is quite a bit trickier than the controller setup.

[ElBartoME] has put a video up on YouTube that shows him inserting his mock cartridges and navigating the menus with an original SNES controller. If it wasn’t for the fact that the console is the size of a smartphone and the on-screen display is generations beyond what the SNES could pull off, you’d think he was playing on the real thing.

We’ve seen some incredibly impressive emulation boxes based on the Raspberry Pi, and builds which tried to embrace original hardware components, but this particular project may represent the best of both worlds.

Continue reading “Homebrew SNES Mini Aims For Historical Accuracy” →

An Old Video Game Controller On Even Older Computer

October 6, 2017 by 13 Comments

For those of us not old enough to remember, and also probably living in the States, there was a relatively obscure computer built by Microsoft in the early 80s that had the strong Commodore/Atari vibe of computers that were produced before PCs took over. It was known as the MSX and only saw limited release in the US, although was popular in Japan and elsewhere. If you happen to have one of these and you’d like to play some video games on it, though, there’s now a driver (of sorts) for SNES controllers.

While the usefulness of this hack for others may not help too many people, the simplicity of the project is elegant for such “ancient” technology. The project takes advantage of some quirks in BASIC for reading a touch-pad digitizer connected to the joystick port using the SPI protocol. This is similar enough to the protocol used by NES/SNES controllers that it’s about as plug-and-play as 80s and 90s hardware can get. From there, the old game pad can be used for anything that the MSX joystick could be used for.

We’ve seen a handful of projects involving the MSX, so while it’s not as popular as Apple or Commodore, it’s not entirely forgotten, either. In fact, this isn’t even the first time someone has retrofitted a newer gaming controller to an MSX: the Wii Nunchuck already works for these machines.

Running The SNES Classic Mini Emulator On The Raspberry Pi

October 6, 2017 by 30 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d be familiar with Nintendo’s hugely popular Classic Mini consoles. Starting with the NES, and now followed with the SNES, the consoles ship in a cute, miniature enclosure and emulate Nintendo classics using the horsepower of modern ARM chips. These consoles use an emulator that has been created especially for the purpose by Nintendo, in house – and [Morris] [krom] wanted to see if he could take the emulator on the SNES Classic Mini and run it on the Raspberry Pi.

Yes, there are already SNES emulators on the Raspberry Pi. But anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of emulation can see the clear interest in the tricks and techniques Nintendo are using to achieve the feat. In particular, Nintendo engineers have the benefit of access to internal documentation that can make the job a lot easier, particularly when dealing with edge cases.

[krom] has been kind enough to share the full instructions necessary to recreate this feat. One stumbling block was the difference in hardware between the Raspberry Pi and the SNES Classic Mini – the Pi using a Broadcom GPU instead of the SNES’s Mali hardware. However, a workaround was simple enough – swapping out some libraries was all that was required. It also gives some interesting insight – it looks like the SNES Classic Mini relies on the SDL libraries to run.

While emulation of the SNES has been a largely solved problem for quite some time, it’s great to see more work going on in the field. In particular, the official Nintendo emulation is reported to be particularly adept at running games that rely on the SuperFX chip.

For another take on SNES emulation, try out your old Mario games on the HoloLens.

Thanks [Morris] for the tip!