Posts tagged "nintendo"

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The Bare NESessities

The Nintendo NES has more than its fair share of Achilles’ heels, but the motherboard is not usually one of them. Even so, there’s an open-source replacement motherboard for the system. Blog superfriend Keegs constructed one, but it’s not quite working. Let’s figure out what’s going on and take a look at the unique features of this new board.

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How Test Suite It Is

You can always tell when it’s the holidays. The days are getting shorter, I’m always going out to shovel snow off the sidewalk, and I have a hankering to build a Famicom cartridge. Or, more specifically, a blog friend asked me to put one together, so I’m using my Tengen Tetris piracy skills… for good?

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Tengen-trifying the Neighbourhood

Years ago, I was offered a copy of the Tengen version of Tetris for the NES, and passed it up because $60 was way too much for a boxed NES game. I regret that. Let’s make one.

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Revenge of the Famicom composite video mod

When we last read about the Famicom composite mod, there were a bunch of changes I wanted to make, but left tragically undone in the name of getting in some Mario time over the holidays. Now I’m going to make a solid effort at producing a more production-ready version of the modification.

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Adding composite video to a Famicom

Since I’ve been reading I Am Error, I’ve been getting more and more interested in the technical aspects of the Famicom. Turns out all you really need to get me interested in your console is prose explanations of how a pattern table works. Also, I get to drip some molten lead into it so I can use a modern TV! Everyone wins.

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Let's visit Portopia

In order to get to the bottom of a mystery, I had to put a lot of other mysteries in my way first. And then also build some hardware. At the end of this entry, I’ll have actually used old hardware to play a videogame. I’m scared too.

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Raising the iQue of my home

When Nintendo wanted to enter the burgeoning Chinese market in 2003, they did so with a neat redesigned Nintendo 64 in a single joypad. Unfortunately, they didn’t sell a lot of them (eight to twelve thousand units, depending who you ask). This makes it an interesting and uncommon artifact from Nintendo history. I won one on YouTube. Here it is! Let’s play some games.

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A Game Boy Macro

There are a lot of broken Nintendo DS consoles out there. A shattered screen there, a broken flip hinge here: it would be nice if someone could do something to save some of those wounded machines. Someone did do something!

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More Japanese exchange students arrived

Another postie-threatening crate arrived on my porch this week. There’s a lot of projects in this one; I’m not even sure a single one is “usable” as-is. This one sort of got away from me, but those are the fun kind!

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Super Famicom Repair-O-Rama!

I bought a large lot of Super Famicoms off of Japanese auction for cheap, and set about trying to repair them. Almost all of them had problems.