Abstract

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Remember the Nintendo NES craze of the 80’s? The SNES? Surely you’ve played the Nintendo 64 right? Likely your NES died long ago, but who says you can’t play those games on your computer? There are several emulators out there for each and every Nintendo and Sega platform, and if you have the software ROMs for those games, then you can play those games on a PC. But without the right controller, it’s just not the same gameplay. So I’m going to show you how hook up a Nintendo pad to a PC.

Media Center PC’s are the newest craze too, but most all of them are huge, noisy, and ugly. Or they’re crazy expensive. What you really want is a media center PC that is quiet, cool, capable and affordable.

At some point a couple coworkers in my office asked me to spec parts for a media center PC for them. I did what they wanted – and they came out big, powerful, ugly and expensive. In the process I concluded that what I wanted was something small, unique, silent, and classic. Hence the Nintendo PC. I’m not the first guy to do this, and to give credit, this is an earlier one. But from what I can tell that person didn’t set up the Nintendo controller ports, make it capable of being a media PC, etc. So I’m going to show you how to build a retro Nintendo PC Media Center console! Your friends will think you have mad case mod skills, and your Gamecube-playin’ kids – if you have any – will wonder what that thing is that you’ve made, and your coworkers will likely want to borrow the coolest Sneaker PC in the office.

Click any picture to enlarge.

Parts List

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There’s not much room for err here so I’m going to be pretty specific about the parts, and what to consider when making your purchases.

Case Moddin’

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Start by dismantling the old Nintendo console. Don’t throw anything away just yet, as we will reuse a lot of parts! Take it completely apart, but save the screws. As you can see, this is going to be a very tight fit, especially if you are planning on using the PCI slot. Just warning ya.

Look at the dark grey base. There are a bunch of little plastic columns where the screws come thru to hold the unit together. Take out your motherboard and observe that it will just fit on the left side (if the unit is facing you) if you knock out a lot of those columns. Take your dremel tool to cut them off at their base – and keep them for later. Try to make the inside fairly flush. The only columns you will still have left are the two on each angled side of the base, and the one in the center-front underneath the cartridge bay. That’s still plenty to hold the unit together. And don’t forget to cut out the corresponding columns in the top of the case if you cut them at the bottom – should just be the one at the center-back. Oh, and if you plan on re-using the original Nintendo power and RCA ports – which will make it look more authentic – then you should not cut off the mounting column on the right side for that little AV connector box.

If you are going to use the PCI slot, then you need to cut out the T-Shaped elevated area in the bottom as well. This is difficult to do neatly, but just try your best. Cut it so that you can glue it back inside the bottom of the case flush with everything else. You will need to trim it a few times to get the fit right. Then take some packing tape and tape the gaps on the bottom side. You will now basically mold a casting to hold the T-shaped portion to the rest of the case. From the inside of the case, take the superglue and put a drop on the places where the pieces touch. After that has dried, take the Shoe Goo and carefully fill the gaps. Epoxy also works well if it is good epoxy and you get the mixture right. I was in the Middle East when I tried this, and the epoxy there is horrible – never would dry well, and when the unit was hot it would run out of the cracks!

Now it’s time to fit the motherboard. You want to mount it as low as possible, to the left back corner of the case. To mount the motherboard you will have to create sockets for the mounting holes of the motherboard in the case. Using the Sharpie/marker, mark where the holes will be for the screws. Take the face plate for the back of the motherboard and mark where you will need to cut a hole in the case for it. Use the dremel with the cutting tool to cut the rectangular hole in the back side of the case, starting with just the bottom half. You may find it easier to cut straight lines by stacking books or something underneath the dremel so that you are just moving it across. Becareful here – you can always cut more if you don’t cut enough, but if you cut too much, that is permanent! After you have done the bottom half, mark the outline for the upper half of the case and cut enough to get the back case plate to just fit with the unit assembled.

Now to deal with the motherboard mounting screws. They have to be mounted from the bottom side, thru both the case and the motherboard. Also, there is about a 2 mm gap between the motherboard and the case. To fill this gap, take the columns you cut out earlier and slice eight 2 mm washers out of them. You will need to widen the holes of four of them, and the other four will serve as the nuts to hold the motherboard on. At this point you can go ahead and attach the motherboard. You will probably need to use needle-nosed pliers to get your plastic nuts snug – but not too snug.

For extra cool points, try to re-use the original Nintendo AV and power ports. You will need to carefully take it off the Nintendo breadboard and tear it apart. This is where some powerful tin snips come in handy. You only want the 2 sides of the metal box that have the connectors. Cut everything else off except but leave the hole for screwing it back in at the side, and take care not to bend it up too much. I was able to reuse the power connector with my power brick, but had to cut everything off past the channel selector switch to make room for the motherboard. I thought about reusing the audio and video RCA connectors for video out and coax audio out, but these will no doubt have a lot of noise on them and the motherboard I chose already had these connections. So I just left them unconnected.

Power and Rest Buttons

The blue or white (or both) push switches are simply to large to fit with the motherboard there because they will get in the way of the IDE cables. This might not be the case with the Pentium M mini-ITX. Also, the power switch keeps the signal low (connected) once you press it because of it’s designed to stay depressed. Don’t worry, this is very fixable. If you cut off the large back end of the switches (everything past the springs) then you have something that fits, and doesn’t stay depressed. Note that you will have to leave enough plastic there to keep the spring from sliding off. You still need the spring-action! Now everything will fit and the power button will return to normal open position when you release it, therefore allowing the motherboard to power on correctly.

Well, except that it’s not wired! Whops! Don’t worry; this one is fixable as well. Take a piece of wire that is thin and long enough to get from the pinout for the hard drive led, power and reset buttons area on the motherboard to the power buttons, with extra for error. Perhaps the best thing to do is get a CD-ROM audio cable because these will adapt to the motherboard pins perfectly. The ground wires you will ground to the metal bar that the buttons are attached to. Each positive/signal wire will be wrapped around a bent and pointed picture frame backing joint set inside of the buttons with a bit of superglue so that when the button is pressed the metal tip of the picture frame joint touches the metal bar the switches are attached to. This will complete a circuit when depressed.

Now you can test your hardware. Attach the CPU and memory, power, etc and just turn it on. Make sure that your buttons and LED work as expected.

At this point, go do something else, hang out with friends or something. It no doubt took a while to get this far and you’re in danger of becoming a hermit. You have the main portion of the case mod done. But there are still a lot of details we will have to address to finish this up.

PCI Riser

If you are using a PCI or PCI-Express riser card, you will want to create some mounting brackets for it so that it stays in place! I found that just inserting things and screwing the PCI card face plate to the back of the unit wasn’t enough to keep the riser and card in place – the rocky desert roads of Qatar caused them to come lose. It took me a while to realize that the PCI card was lose and not hosed! If you bought the riser card I mentioned above then you got one with mounting holes.

The way to do this is to stick the PCI riser in the PCI slot, then take two plastic columns that you cut out of the bottom of the Nintendo case and cut them to just fit between the side of the case and the riser card. You will screw the riser card to the side of the case using these columns, so make sure you use two columns that you haven’t torn up to make washers and nuts to hold the motherboard in place. Also, these columns will probably contact the side of the case along the edge where the angled side meets the straight side, so you will have to cut the other end to fit. Get it right, so that the riser card will have the right angle. Attach the columns to the side of the case with Shoe Goo.

PCI Card

You will have to cut the top of the Nintendo case so that your PCI card face plate is exposed. I beat the face plate flat so that the angle where the screw usually goes was flat. That end of the face plate will set on and in front of the motherboard face plate (see picture) so that they help to keep each other in place. If you got the X-Card or if your PCI card has holes in it for mounting, then you will also be able to fasten the card in better to prevent it from coming loose. Using tin snips, cut out a small chunk of sheet metal from the leftover Nintendo console parts about 1 cm x 2 cm. Shape it into an L bracket with rounded edges, and punch two holes for screws using your dremel.

If you bought the VIA MII1200 then, oddly enough, there is a hole in the motherboard face plate directly underneath the hole in the X-Card behind the PCI face plate – how convenient! Using appropriate screws and those brass motherboard mounting screws that come with computer cases, secure your PCI card to the face plate of the motherboard.

Again, if you bought the parts I did, you can also fasten the back of the PCI card to the riser card. You can stack flat pieces of plastic to create another L-bracket like the one in the picture here and punch holes in it to keep the back of the PCI card in the riser slot. You can create the plastic strips from the cover that was on the bottom of the case in the center of the elevated T-shaped section you cut out and made flat.

DVD drive

I hope you waited until now to do attach the drive. If you didn’t, then you chanced cutting into the drive when you made the hole for the PCI slot! It is barely too wide to fit as is to the underside of the top of the case so you will need to cut off one of the plastic game cartridge guides – cut off the one on the right. Use the double-sided tape without exposing the sticky side to the DVD drive to test the fit of the Drive. Go ahead and attach the pin adaptor and ribbon IDE cable because those factor into the fit – it will be tight. You may need 2 or more layers of tape, not just one. Once you are happy with the fit, remove the plastic from the tape and make it a permanent fit. Cut a couple strips from leftover plastic and superglue them to the case alongside the DVD and then under the DVD on each side to keep the DVD drive in place when/if the tape starts to fail under heat.

Hard Drive

As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of space left in the case, except for on the right side – and that’s where the hard drive will go. You will place it on it’s side over the air slits in the bottom of the case. To secure the hard drive you have a couple options. One is to take some double-sided tape and cover the 9.5 mm side you will put down with a 3 cm-wide strip of tape. Then you mash it down into the case, and take two 2 cm-wide strips on each side overlapping the first piece of tape on the hard drive with the excess width being applied to the bottom of the case to keep it stationary. While this might be a good shock absorber, it cuts back on the circulation and cooling efficiency of the case and hard drive.

Your other option is to make a couple plastic “L” brackets and screw the drive into the plastic brackets which are super glued into the bottom of the case. You might want to hold of on that until you have seen how other cables will fit.

IDE cables – you will probably be best off with a short 8 or 10 inch rounded cable, stuffed underneath the cartridge bay.

Nintendo Controller Ports

Now for a little more case mod fun. Pull out those USB-to-Nintendo controller chips you picked up from Retrozone. Yes, they were in fact a bit overpriced, but he’s got a corner on the market. If you got the old version it will have several resistors and other components that you have the joy of wiring first. If he forgot to include the URL to the wiring diagram (or the diagram itself) then email and he will get it to you. If he tells you to check the website FAQ, tell him it’s still not there, and he will give you the correct URL. I am going to describe how to wire these things on the inside of the Nintendo rather than inside the game pads. If you fancy tearing up an authentic game pad, then wire up the chip inside the game pad, but you aren’t going to be able to use the Nintendo ports on the case.

On the Nintendo circuit board, the controller ports connect via a small 7-conductor beige connector. I would pull out your soldering gun and remove them in order to use them for convenience – if you have the old style USB chip, Shoe Goo them to the back side of the chip. If you have the new style, you will probably just want to leave them separate. Wire the chips as the diagram shows you. The USB cable included only needs to be a couple inches, so chop that back before you connect it. Now you need to get the USB connector into the motherboard. If your motherboard was complete, it probably came with the necessary adaptor. If not, you will need to get one. You can find an internal front bay connector for USB 2.0 like this one and then use the pertinent guts from that.

To fit all this in the case, take the clear plastic tape and put a layer on the chips so that they don’t somehow short each other. Then you can stuff them down into the front right corner of the case around the plastic column. Run the USB cables underneath the cartridge bay where the IDE cables are. Coil the excess cable between the motherboard and the PCI card or between the PCI card and the DVD drive.

SNES Game Pads

If you have a SNES controller, you can actually hook this up to the NES controller ports, and use the same chips! This way you can use a SNES controller for those SNES games. I really wish I had my diagrams to show you, but I have packed everything up and am in the process of moving. The secret is to take another Nintendo controller plug (from the light zapper if you have it) and carefully disconnect the plug from the wires. Now wire the SNES controller wires into the NES controller plug with the same color combinations and sequence you find on the female side of the ports in the case. Now compare the diagrams that Retrozone supplies for wiring the SNES and NES pads to the chips they supply. If you notice, they are the same except for two wires that are reversed on the SNES diagram. So take those two wires that differ and swap their locations in the NES plug. Now your chip will be able to communicate with both controller types. You will probably have to reconfigure the joystick properties in Windows so that the buttons do the right thing if you switch from NES to SNES controller.

Infrared

So if you bought a fancy remote, or you are using the X-Card, you will have an infrared receiver. Why put this ugly thing on top of the Nintendo when it can fit inside! What you need to do is dismantle it as much as possible. It will probably come down to a small circuit board with a couple of LED’s on the front of it. The best place to mount this is above the Nintendo ports in the case. If you are using the X-Card, the circuit board is pretty wide – the quickest approach is to fasten it to the case with a screw just inside the cartridge bay thru one of the holes in the circuit board (see picture) and use a plastic nut created from those cut-off columns. If you are really concerned about this screw throwing off your authentic look of the case then you could create another plastic “L” bracket and fasten it from the other side if you are so inclined. But that is much more difficult, and you’ve just cut a big hole in the case for your infrared receiver anyway!

Cool Quietly

If you are using a VIA MII1200 or similar model, no doubt you have noticed by now that the fan isn’t very quiet. How fun would it be to watch a movie with the whine of the CPU fan? You would no doubt get used to it, but I would recommend swapping it with a 60mm fan. I used the Stealth™ model, because it was supposed to be quiet. It is a snug fit up against the memory and the ATX power supply daughter board, and I secured it with some clear packing tape. I found that in practice it really wasn’t much quieter after all. But it pushes plenty of air. So I picked up a rheostat and put that inline the CPU fan connector. Now I can really make this thing silent, and push just enough air to keep it from melting down when the Nintendo is sitting on a table in a cool room. When in a cabinet with poor circulation, you won’t be able to run silently.

For Pentium-M folks, you might also want to try the rheostat trick. I’m not sure how hot it will run in the crammed case, but it will give you opportunity to run it quietly.

Other Bits

There are other things you may want to wire to complete things – which are specific to your combination of motherboard, PCI-Card, and so on. I went ahead and wired an extra ground wire between the power supply daughter board and the DVD drive adaptor because I had noise on the audio output of the drive. I also soldered a cable from the motherboard coax digital output connector to the input connector on the X-Card.

Testing & Configuration

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There's a lot that can go wrong in this project, so make sure you test things thoroughly.

Smoke Test

Did you wire it right? Now’s the time to find out! Double check the polarity for the power and reset buttons, any grounding wiring you added, coax connections, etc. Turn it on and watch for smoke. If it looks good, boot into Windows and test your infrared wiring. Test the Nintendo USB chips.

Fit and Finish

Does everything look like it will fit in the case? Check that once you close the case, nothing exposed can possibly come into contact and short each other out. Go ahead and close it up, and call it finished.

Media Center Features

Since this is all software-driven, I’m not going to get much into testing and sorting that out. It can be a chore in itself. I can tell you that I am able to record DVD-quality video for play now or later, but I don’t think I have been able to record in DiVX format yet. Plextor released new drivers that I will need to test, that issue is hopefully fixed. I am able to play beautiful DVD’s with very vibrant color up to 780p High Definition. I can watch TV if I have one hooked up, and record that too. All without using any of the features of Windows XP Media Center Edition!

Emulating Nintendo Games

To play the games, you need the ROMs and the emulators. You’re on your own for getting the ROMs. The emulators are freely available at http://www.emulator-zone.com For playing N64 games I found that the 1964 Emulator and the Project64 Emulator worked best, depending on which game you were considering. One is faster while the other is more compatible. My system is barely able to keep up with some of the games, and GoldenEye is way too intensive for the integrated graphics and N64 emulation. For the SNES emulation I found ZNES to work well. For NES, VirtuaNES works well. NES and SNES emulators are plenty fast but seem to have a jiggyness to them – I think this is a refresh rate issue (the Nintendos ran at 50 Hz whereas the PC runs at 60 Hz). You might not see that issue if you use the TV output.

If you create a separate user account for each system, and set the respective emulator to start automatically at logon, then even a five-year-old can turn on the Nintendo, click the user (with a picture of the appropriate Icon) and play the games.

Conclusion

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Wow, for a cool $500-$700 we built a stinkin’ cool and expensive Nintendo and at the same time incorporated Media PC functionality. If I had it to do over again, I think I would go for the Pentium M setup for a little more horsepower. It’s a shame that PCI video cards cannot be crammed into this little box! I can’t justify the expense of doing that now.