So I was inspired one day by this instructables, NES PC
http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Nintendo-NES-PC/
Written by Hatsuli, who has since passed on to the great workshop where the Maker hacks all things together.
It’s nothing new, but the technology has progressed somewhat since the original inception.
I’ll just post my parts list and challenges I encountered.
This was before I decided to put the fan on the top of the case
Firstly, I took the innards out of his NES.
Then I used my dremel to grind down almost all of the posts that were in the center and back, leaving the 4 posts at the corners to use to hold the box tight. Keep the posts at the front where your power and reset buttons where located – we’ll use these later.
I used the motherboard from this kit:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107076
When I got it, it was open box and I had a coupon, so it was much cheaper.
It was useful because board height was low, and it had ample fan headers. And I just got a E350 board and that went into this case.
the board is Mini ITX – dual core atom 525 cpu, with an Nvidia ION 2nd gen gpu. If you shave down all the posts, the motherboard sits very nicely against the rear and you can dremel down the rear to install the backplate. I hot glued the backplate down against the rear after marking it out. Always better to shave these too tight then adjust, cause it’s a pain in in the butt add more plastic.
You can put the board flat on the cross.
To mount your hard drive – use a piece of paper. Flip it over and put the hard drive in a corner, and mark where all the screw mount points are. Cut the paper out and use it as a template on the bottom of your NES. Before you drill anything – make sure that your drive will fit where you have chosen AND the associated SATA cable and power. I lucked out when I spaced my drive installation.
You can evidently use the flat screws that are usually used to mount cdrom drives in a computer case- drive them in from the bottom and you will have the hard drive securely mounted to the bottom of your NES case.
The motherboard should fit nicely over this, supported by the cross bottom.
motherboard sans drive, testing the fit
Remember those posts by the front buttons – it turns out that a dual USB case blank has perfect spacing if you take the usb plugs out. Cut off the ends and you should be able to use two screws to bolt the blank into two of them very tightly. (The instructable calls to rewire the buttons and keep the assembly to use as buttons. I kept the buttons so I could run Scott’s NES from a cardboard box).
Then you can take two push buttons from any old case’s reset and power and slot them, reusing the original power an reset buttons. These can be hot glued to your converted blank which is now mounted solidly. There’s a little play but it works. You can also put a red LED and hook that to the motherboard power header.
Do this before you mount your motherboard. Let it dry (important to always let hot glue dry) and then you can put your backplate in and hot glue it. If you put the motherboard into the case, you can use the usb blank as a wedge and it will hold the motherboard tightly in place, which is kinda cool (at least I thought so).
Run your sata cables around the case to your interfaces. If you are going to do the USB in lieu of NES controller plugs thing, you can do it – just take the ones you use for external plugging and you can slot a screw, bolt, and washer through, and cut the case of the usb plug to sit in the upper angled area of the plug port. Tighten the washer down to lock it in and smear hot glue all over it. To get super fancy, make a paper template and use some black plastic to create a perfect plug cover.
First test – everything booted. Playing video to tax the cpu created some pretty high temps (45+ C according to fanspeed)as the case is meant for passive cooling when it houses the usual NES hardware. Instead, I reused a cpu fan and shroud from an old Xeon kit I had, and once again bolted it to the top of the case, this time cutting a hole so air could blow air in and down onto the motherboard and gpu/cpu heatsinks. This let the machine run at a cool 34C while playing Two Towers, so I was satisfied.
bios post
I took a miniPCI wireless ethernet card – el cheapo broadcom chipset, and 2 antenna from a junked laptop- these wires were hot glued around the case and provide decent signal, so that made the NES PC wireless as well.
All in all – pretty cute box –
all my emulators
Dosbox
6 USB ports
4GB of RAM
hdmi / DVI Audio over cable
320 GB HD.
And looks like a NES.
Further plans – put in a fan cover so fingers don’t get snapped up by the fan. I tried making my own by drilling individual holes, but it was a pain.
Also, found a cool guy who sells Nintendo NES conversion kits. Pretty simple to use – disassemble, clean, solder the wires from the controller to the IC board. So now I have a USB controller for emulators.
go here to continue, but only follow the part up to install the udlfb driver and configure X
