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--By Jaffo
Adventures in making a NES
PC.
For more info, please take a look over
here.
Click on thumbnails to enlarge.
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Removal of the "T" to make more
room for the motherboard. This became a lot easier when
I got the flex shaft extension for my Dremel tool. |
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A while back, AOL sent me a trial CD in
a DVD case. I saved the case (for no particular reason).
The bottom of my NES case is made of this leftover AOL
DVD case. Also, on the right side, you'll see a grey piece
of plastic - this was originally in the center of the
"T" that got cut out.
Also, just an FYI, the side of the DVD case where you
would put a CD works great as an epoxy mixing bowl -
and the hinges of a DVD case work well as mixing and
spreading spatulas.
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Once my components arrived, I wanted to
make sure that they worked before stuffing them into my
NES case. I also wanted to make sure that my NES Power/Reset/LED
worked - they did. |
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In this picture, the right side of the CD
Rom drive is being held up by the small notch I had to
cut out to allow the drive to slide in. The back middle
section is held up by a piece of Velcro. This wasn't the
industrial strength Velcro, so I actually epoxy'd the
Velcro on. The left side of the CD Rom is actually held
up by a binder clip and a screw (the "arms"
have been removed from the binder clip.) I added the screw
to make sure that the clip would lean the right way and
hold up the drive. I did end up removing this binder clip
and putting a strip of industrial strength Velcro along
the left side.
Also, I forgot to get a picture of it, but the hard
drive ended up being mounted with Velcro to the bottom
of the CD drive.
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I had to remove the power plug from the
power supply for a couple of reasons. 1-to mount it and
2-the wires leading to the power supply were too short
to accommodate where I wanted to mount the power supply.
I clipped it in the middle and added short lengths of
wire and shrink tubing - works well.
In this picture the power supply is laying where it
ended up, but is not secured at this point.
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This picture shows the location of the power
supply. In this picture, it is not currently secured -
at the time I was still deciding how I wanted to hold
it in place. If you notice, I drew two red circles in
the picture - these are the location of some of the original
screw holes (one is obscured by the bundle of wires).
I ended up using epoxy to glue some screws to the inside
of the case at these circled points. My plan was to just
screw down some nuts - but they nuts were too big! I ended
up just putting a "zip-tie" on the screw as
tight as I could. This held the power supply in perfectly.
That is how it ended up being mounted. We'll see how it
stands up to heat and other abuses, but I think it'll
be fine.
I have heard it said that someone could take over the
world with duct tape. If that happened, I'd usurp that
person with a combination of duct tape and zip ties....
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Well, here's the finished product. I had
a heck of a time making all those wires, ribbon cables,
etc. fit in there, but in the end I did it. I meant to
take a lot more pictures, but when I got on a roll, I
forgot to. Sorry about that everyone. I did end up wiring
up the controller ports to the parallel port and using
the driver that was available in Wasson's
tutorial - so the controller ports work for NES controllers.
I was very happy about that. |
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Here's a back view of my completed NES PC.
My dremel cuts weren't the straightest, but that's ok,
it is the back of the machine! That big white adapter
you see is actually the housing from a serial connector
we used to use on our dumb terminals at work. I used that
because I didn't want to have bare solder points exposed.
Plus it allows me to screw it down to the parallel port. |
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This is just another view of the back from
a slightly lower angle. You can now see the VGA port,
S-video, and RCA jacks. |
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These are just pictures of my NES PC in
action - emulating Mario 3. You can see the LED works.
It took me a while, but the controller works fine, too. |
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