Suped-Up NES



This is way old. I have seen lots of these since I first did mine, however they all pretty much suck! This one was the first and is still the best as you use REAL NES controllers on a REAL NES box, however the box is jam packed with a computer running a nes emulator... The rip offs dont let you use NES controllers and put more emulators on it. I mean, its easy to add a genesis emulator to this project, but why would you want to?? That wasnt the point of this.. I wanted an NES to play like an NES...


Dont try this at home
I am not good at soldering or HTML
Don't yell at me if you attempt this and screw up your nes/computer/life
I don't know where to get roms.
You can email me at wagonbutterworth@hotmail.com with questions/suggestions
Update 9/2/02 More pics!

I was tired of the blinking screen on my TV whenever I powered up my beloved NES. I would clean the connector, and blow until I was dizzy, but the blasted thing still would not work. I bought quite a few of them for less than $5 at Good Wills, but most of them never worked.

I can't stand emulators becuase you have to use a nice game pad and watch the game on your computer screen. I wanted to play my games with original NES controllers on my tv.

First I went looking for a way to connect NES controllers to your computer. I found several sites with diagrams for connecting to your parallel port. I ended up using something called PSX Gamepad for the driver, but there are others. The most confusing part was how to wire the damn things up. There was no consistency as to how the pins were numbered. Here is a junk diagram to show you how my pin numbers went. This is from the perspective of looking at the back side of the connectors. This is what you see when you are soldering.


NES---Parallel Port
6-->2
5-->3
1->4-9
7->18-19
4->10

If you have more controllers, pins 1,5,6,7 all go to the same port for each controller. Pin 4 is the only one that changes and it goes on the pins following 10 (11, 12, etc).

on pins 4-9, you are supposed to have diodes wich allow current to go to you controller, but not backwards. You can use the cheapest ones that radio shack sells for this

Now that you got the controller(s) all wired up, install your software, and go into the control panel and see if it works. If it doesnt, you probably are not getting enough voltage out of your parallel port. Check it with a voltmeter. I was getting something like 4.2 volts, so I had to search for another source. Hard drives have a +5v, so I tapped into that. So my pin 1 on the nes went to the +5v (red) on my hard drive line, and my pin 7 on the nes went to the ground (black) on the hard drive. Screw the diode, I dont really know what it does anyways. This picture attempts to show the mess of wires that was created because of this:

OK. Now that we have the controllers working, we need a way to play the games. The only emulater I could find that supported my controllers was RockNes, so the choice was easy for me. There are probably others, but who cares, this one works. The only thing I dont like is that I cannot select games with the controller, you need a mouse or a keyboard.

Now we have a working system that plays games. It is now time to cram the computer into little NES box. For this I used the EPIA 800 main board. It's super small and has on board tv-out, sound and network (among other things). I added 256MB ram, 20 GB hard drive and installed win2k. This board uses a normal atx power supply. I did not have room for one, so I searched for an external one. The Morex Cubid 2677 had an external powersupply. Instead of figuring out where they got theirs from, I just bought the case and stripped out the power supply. NExt came the fun part. Buy a cheap broken NES and gut it. Then take the dremmel and cut everything except the 4 screws in the corners.

External to the NES, I need a spot to plug in the power supply, audio out, video out, and a network port. I also need the parallel port wired directly to the controller ports. And, I need the NES's power button to turn the whole thing on. The NES power locks in place (AT Style). Since this is an ATX board, I just wired the reset button of the nes to the power input of the board.
Joystick and power cables:

Sound/Video

The motherboard and the psu fit nicely in to the bottom of the NES. Now I couldnt figure out how to mount the hard drive. I wanted it to just sit on top of the board, but it might short something out that way. Then I got a brilliant idea, I'll just wrap the bottom of the drive with electrical tape.

Now its time to put the lid on and test it out. I was too excited to properly mount the ports for sound/video/power/network, but who cares, I'll save that for a day when the power goes out, I want to play some games!
It looks nice with my others

Booting up

Select Game

Double Dragon!

A few side notes. I had to put it under my Master System because in all my excitement I lost the screws. I select the games remotely, PC Anywhere did not work for some reason, so I am using some crappy rip-off for the moment. I think I should add another fan because it might get hot in there.