snes

110 Articles

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?

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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.

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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!

Portable SNES Chiptune Player

August 30, 2017 by 8 Comments

Chiptunes are the fantastic, bleeping musical renditions of the soundchips of retro consoles past. Performers of the art overwhelmingly favour the various flavours of Game Boy, though there are those who work with such varied machines as the Commodore 64, Sega Genesis, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. A little more off the beaten track in the chiptune scene is the Super Nintendo, but [kevtris] has struck out and built a chiptune player for SNES-based music.

The heavy lifting is handled by an FPGA, which emulates the SNES’s S-SMP sound processor, and handles loading the music from the SPC-format files. Being chiptunes, these files store both the instrument data as well as the note data for the music. Audio output is clean and crisp, as heard in the test video.

The laser cut case lends the device a great aesthetic.

Case design is where this project really shines. Laser cut clear acrylic is combined with a bright LCD character display and some LEDs which create an effect not unlike a glowing magical block from your 90s platformer of choice. It’s combined with some slick capacitive buttons that avoid the need to drill holes for bulky traditional buttons. [kevtris] goes through the case design, showing how it all fits together with a combination of screws and standoffs. Being built out of a series of essentially 2D slices, the case is stacked up one layer at a time.

What really stands out about this project is the fit and finish. There’s plenty of microcontroller and FPGA projects out there that can hum out a tune, but the attention to detail paid to the case design and the neatly laid out PCB really add polish to a project like this. For a different take, why not check out this chiptune player built around a Raspberry Pi?

[Thanks Morris!]

Game Gear HDMI With SNES Controller

July 23, 2017 by 10 Comments

With its backlit color screen and Master System compatibility, the Game Gear was years ahead of its main competition. The major downside was that it tore through alkaline batteries quickly, and for that reason the cheaper but less equipped Game Boy was still able to compete. Since we live in the future, however, the Game Gear has received new life with many modifications that address its shortcomings, including this latest one that adds an HDMI output.

The core of the build is an FPGA which is used to handle pixel decoding and also handles the HDMI output. The FPGA allows for a speed high enough to handle all the data that is required, although [Stephen] still has to iron out some screen-filling issues, add sound over HDMI, and take care of a few various pixel glitches. To turn this hack into a complete hodgepodge of adapters, though, [Stephen] has also added an SNES controller adapter to the Game Gear as well. Nintendo has featured Sonic in many of its games, so although we may have disagreed back in the early 90s we think that this Sega/Nintendo pairing is not crossing any boundaries anymore.

Game Gears have had their share of other modifications as well to make them more capable as a handheld system than they were when they were new. We’ve also seen them turned into a console system (they were Master System compatible, after all) and converted into other things entirely, too.

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Interfacing A Retro Controller Using The USBASP

June 22, 2017 by 7 Comments

An ISP dongle is a very common piece of equipment on a maker’s bench. However, its potential as a hackable device is generally overlooked. The USBASP has an ATmeg8L at its heart and [Robson] decided that this humble USB device could be used as an interface between his PC and a SNES Joypad.

A SNES controller required three pins to communicate with a host: clock, data and latch. In his hack, [Robson]  connects the controller to the ISP interface using a small DIY adaptor and programs the AVR using the V-USB library. V-USB is a software USB library for small microcontrollers and comes in pretty handy in this instance.

[Robson] does a pretty good job of documenting the entire process of creating the interface which includes the USB HID code as well as the SNES joypad serial protocol. His hack works on both Windows and Linux alike and the code is available on GitHub for download.

Simple implementation like this project are a great starting point for anyone looking to dip their toes in the DIY USB device pool. Veterans may find a complete DIY joystick more up their alley and will be inspired by some plastic techniques as well.