A little more progress on the Nintendo PC.

This post once again is pretty late on going up since I did this work almost 2 weeks ago but like always time is my worst enemy lol. Anyhoo on to the nitty gritty. Here you will see my current work area IE the dining room table lol.

For my first task I had to cut out all the unnecessary materiel on the bottom portion of the Nintendo. The middle had this raised area that had to be dremeled out. The big hole in the middle wont matter much since I will be covering it with some aluminum sheeting when I install the motherboard.

The next step was squaring out the port holes where the controllers plug in. I had to do this due to the fact that the retro usb plugs I had ordered were square and not with a angled notch on one side like the original ports were.

Next up was modifying the retro usb ports so that they fit through the holes I just squared out. Once again my best friend the dremel came to the rescue

If you notice I had to dremel out the top of the port, this served two purposes, one was because it wouldn't pass through the hole, and second, its a stop preventing the port sticking out anymore than it should. This part almost marked the first time I got to use my Dial calipers in order to measure out how much material I had to grind away.
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I had to do something similar to the bottom, only difference was there was nothing to grind off. Instead I had to glue a piece of thick sturdy cardboard.

Next thing to work on is something to mount the ports to the bottom of the Nintendo and hopefully install the motherboard. Alas all that will have to wait though, because hopefully this week I will finally have the lathe moved into the shed. Till next post!

My own Nintendo PC.

Like I didn't have enough on my plate already I decided to start another project lol. This was a project that I started over 10 years and really didn't do much with it. Recently though I was roaming the internet and was feeling nostalgic and the itch began. At first I really didn't want to start something new again but then I decided why not, I had almost all the parts already. I booted the thing up the other day and was surprised it still worked, which was a good thing because one of my goals on this project was to not throw anymore money at it.

Currently all the parts are in a spare PC case I had from a long time ago, this way its alot easier to install everything I need program wise. Upon booting up I forgot that I installed windows 98 on it and it had all sorts of problems, so after a nice reformat and clean install of a updated windows XP thing ran like a champ.
After that  I had to figure out the controller problem that stumped me all those years ago. After a while of looking up how to wire a Nes Controller to play through a USB port I was saddened that I would have to buy a special chip in order for the NES controller to work. So after deciding I didnt really want to spend alot of time and money into soldering (which I totally intend to learn how to do...eventually). I found these little bad boys

RetroPort from RetroZone

Basically for the money I would of spent on buying all the mats for modding the controller Ill get these instead, plus I dont have to destroy a perfectly good Nes controller. Next came trying to get 2 working Nes controllers, which at first I had 2 choices 1 was seeing if anyone I knew had any to either give or sell me, 2 was ordering some online. Then later that week it totally dawned on my that under my mess in my art room there was a perfectly good Nes with 3 controllers, so after some rummaging I finally found it. So that was some money saved there. Shortly after I found the controllers the Retro ports came in the mail, so I anxiously had to try them out, and let me tell you they work phenomenally, just like the real deal I was really happy on how responsive they were. So now the next step which hopefully Ill be able to juggle with the work Iam doing in the shed this week is to mod and fit everything in the empty Nes Shell I have.
Till next post!