My Custom Raspberry Pi NES

[Allan Scott]

Hello all! This is my first post here at Nintendo Forums. I wanted to post a few pictures of a custom Raspberry Pi NES that a friend of mine and I built. The donor NES was dead, so I did not ruin an operational NES.

1. We started by opening the system and pulling out the internals (board and cartridge loader). This gave us the room to install the Raspberry Pi.
2. We then re-wired the NES controller ports and converted them into USB ports. This was accomplished by cutting a donor USB cable and soldering the cut end to the NES controller ports.
3. We also re-wired the power and reset buttons of the NES through the original power connector on the back of the NES and then through the power input on the Pi. This was accomplished by a donor micro usb phone charger.
4. We then took a donor audio/video PSP wire and soldered it to the original audio and composite video ports of the NES.
5. We then swapped out the old power indicator LED for a new, bright red LED. It was a little bright, so we sanded it down a bit to dull the light.
6. The only noticeable case mod that we did was adding an HDMI/USB panel mount adapter to the rear of the case.
7. We created two NES to USB extension cables. They allow us to plug in any USB controller that is out there on the market. I bought two USB NES, USB SNES, USB Sega Genesis and USB N64 controllers. All of them work great!
8. We then closed off the cartridge slot by building a black enclosure under the lid. We took an old "10 Yard Fight" cartridge, cut it to fit and affixed it to the black enclosure. This gives it the illusion that a game cartridge is in the slot.
9. As a side project, we took an iCade joystick and a USB Sega Genesis controller board and created a joystick that is recognized as a Sega Genesis controller.
10. We are running Emulation Station via RetroPie.

Some picture of the build can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_ACvaASJis8SlRnenZ1MFpIZUE

We also built an arcade stick (2 player) with an internal Raspberry Pi setup similar to the one within the NES.
Please let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks,

Allan

 

[Y0shiM0n]

DUDE THAT IS SIIIIICK! I have a R Pi and I would love to do something like that!

 

[Hyrule Chicken]

Wow, that is really impressive. You really thought of everything, I especially like the tip of sanding the light to make it a bit dimmer, I would have never thought of that (and I'm now thinking of going around and sanding all of my bright lights, hahaha).

How long, from start to finish, would you say this whole project took to complete?

 

[crunchyg]

Fantastic mod! I was confused about what the cartridge was doing in there for a moment.

 

[Allan Scott]

Thanks! Once we had the HDMI/USB wire, the build took about 2 hours from start to finish. It was pretty straight forward. As usual, the most difficult part is getting the software configured. That took a good 5 hours.

 

[Hyrule Chicken]

What made you attempt to do this, or what gave you the idea? It's pretty cool, and it seemed to have required a lot of time, effort and planning. I'm just curious as to what gave you the idea to do this mod?

 

[Theteflondon]

Do the wire colors match to convert the nes controller ports to usb? Is there a wiring diagram you used?

 

[dustinb12]

a friend from work is trying to get into this, and sadly i had never heard of it. Im still not understanding all what it can do? Guess I'm trying make myself believe i need one.

What else besides emulating games could i do? This is really cool

(lack of know how showing)