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I Made a NES PC

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First off, let me just say that I purchased a broken NES off of ebay. So no live NES's were harmed in the making of this project.

 

I have had my old PC sat in a cupboard for the best part of a year and thought I'd put the parts to use. I'm no modder, but figured I'd have a go at making something.

 

Settled on making a NES PC, so I searched online and there are a lot of people that have done this kind of thing. So not wanting to do the same thing as other people, I decided to make my build a little different.

 

The following is the only image I took of the almost completed innards:

 

Insides.jpg

 

The motherboard is facing down, so that the CPU fan pushes air down and out of the case. I had a spare exhaust fan so I fit it under the case to help blow the hot air away, not sure if this was needed but it wont be hurting anything.

 

Also the NES is raised up 18mm by some pads which I bought.

 

The feature which I added to my build was an NFC reader which is placed just below the cartridge slot.

 

I found a site that was selling new empty NES carts (so no games had to be destroyed to make this build).

 

Cart.jpg

 

At the moment I have 2 programmed carts that load OverWatch and a media player. I have 10 carts in total so I will be making more, the two I currently have were made just to test to see if the NFC reader worked.

 

Kind of boring, but here is the innards of the cartridge:

 

Cart-NFC.jpg

 

Just an NFC tag to load the application. I'm going to add a second on near to the bottom to see if I can make it close the current application (so removing the cartridge will close the loaded program).

 

I plan on making some custom labels this weekend to stick onto the cartridges, going to try and keep them all 8-bit themed.

 

Cart-Console.jpg

 

The cartridge cradle is glued to the top of the case, I tried to make it so that I could still press down the cartridge, but there just wasn't enough room inside the case.

 

Something which I was pleasantly surprised by is that if I leave the cartridge inside the console when the PC is turned off, once the PC is turned back on it will launch the program as soon as the PC has booted up.

 

Bluetooth.jpg

 

There is a bluetooth usb dongle plugged into the motherboard. When I saw the above two items I just had to buy them to compliment the build :grin:

 

 

 

I may be revisiting this later. As if i change the layout slightly (by standing the PSU up rather than having it laid down) there is room in the case for a low profile GPU. I considered doing this near the end of the build, but the only half-decent GPU I could find that would fit was a 750ti, which is getting quite old now. Plus I didn't want to spend another £125.

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Seems like a really fun project! I actually have a spare NES somewhere, I'm sure there's projects online that turn it into a retro arcade kinda thing. Could combine it with the raspberry pi I have somewhere...

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I'm always jealous at how people can do stuff like this. Looks awesome.

 

I love that NES controller. :geek:

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