nesdev.org

14 April 2009

Howdy Team!

Everyone's heard of these. NES's that have been gutted and replaced with computer innards.

I came across this idea on the Instructables site.

Here's a link:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a ... do-NES-PC/




Has anyone else achieved something of this magnitude?

What are your thoughts?

-Mike

Seems like something that would go in the "General" section. Aside from that, I'm not sure how useful it could be.

Live CD with FCEUX, ZSNES, and some indie games perhaps?

According to the How-To:

Here's the full list of consoles my NES PC currently has installed.
- NES
- Super NES
- Sega Mega Drive / Genesis
- Sega Master System
- MAME (Arcade)
- Game Boy (Color)
- Game Boy Advance
- Sega Game Gear
- Turbo-Grafx 16 / PC-Engine
- Sony Playstation (games run from CD drive)
- Nintendo 64


The NES PC is used without mouse or keyboard! Everything is be done using the gamepads, which makes it feel more like a console (like it should!)

On a side note: I chose to put this in NES Hardware, as it uses NES Hardware in it's design. Mainly, the case. Woop Woop!

tried to do this years ago but my PSU was too big

still have the dremeled case and PC Mobo though.. wish i had saved the NES internals :'(

I'm considering using a miniaturized mainboard.. The brand name Mini-ITX is what covers the ground here.

The majority of the boards are above the $150 mark. But they're small. And they'll fit.

Take a gander at this:

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-Desktop-D ... -E5200-CPU

$230, but it's 17cm x 17cm.

What be the dimensions of the NES case, inside?

-Mike, protector of adventure

I have used Intel's ATOM dual core motherboards before, they are nice, and very cheap.

Interesting!

I'm reading some reviews right now.

Some stated prices are within the $75 USD range.

Tell me, how have they worked out for you in the past?

What are your thoughts on their capabilities?

Their limitations?

I have two Mini ITX systems.
One is powered by the D201GLY2 motherboard, and includes a Celeron 220 processor.
The other is powered by the D945GCLF2 motherboard and includes an Atom 330 dual-core processor (with hyperthreading, so the OS sees 4 logical processors)
I'm running Ubuntu Linux on both boxes. 32-bit OS on the Atom, and 64-bit OS on the Celeron.

I tested Nintendulator:
45 FPS on the Celeron, 50FPS with sound disabled.
20 FPS on the Atom, 30FPS with sound disabled. It's not even getting close to 100% CPU usage, so something must be really wrong here.

Then I tested ZSNES. Native Linux ZSNES is available for 32 bit only, so I used Wine to run ZSNES on the 64 bit OS.
On the Celeron, full speed, 49FPS if using the Super 2xSai filter.
On the Atom, full speed, 52FPS if using the Super 2xSai filter.

I haven't ran Windows on either machine, so I can't tell you exactly what to expect there.

The D201GLY2 (Celeron) has no Composite or S-Video Out port, and has bad default video drivers on Ubuntu. The fixed drivers don't work on the newest versions of Ubuntu.
The D945GCLF2 (Atom) comes with a crappy motherboard fan, it went super noisy within a week. Replace it immediately. (The CPU has no fan, just a heatsink)
They both have only one PCI slot. I have a Gigabit Ethernet card in the Celeron, and a Wifi card in the atom. (atom has Gigabit Ethernet built in)
Celeron machine takes only up to 1GB of RAM, Atom machine takes up to 2GB. 2GB of RAM is about $20.
I have found that the Celeron machine jumps to 100% CPU usage during heavy disk I/O.

Prices:
D201GLY2 (Celeron): $67 to $80 depending on seller (prices exclude shipping). Newegg doesn't sell this one anymore.
D945GCLF2 (Atom): $82 (plus $7 shipping)

Dwedit wrote: 20 FPS on the Atom, 30FPS with sound disabled. It's not even getting close to 100% CPU usage, so something must be really wrong here.

My guess is that Nintendulator is single threaded, and thus can only use one cpu core.

Sounds interesting!

I would most likely be using a heavily-tweaked Windows XP.

S-video and RCA outputs are important to me.

I would go so far as to say HDMI, and turn it into a media centre, but I am not aware of any mini ITX board with that capability as of time of writing

However - For emulation, as which would be the main focus of said machine, I believe the boards you have presented to be an excellent start.

Good work mang!
Thanks! Any more ideas?

You're not going to find RCA audio outputs on anything, but there are always 1/8" stereo jack to RCA converters.
To connect S-Video and stereo 1/8" jack to composite input on a TV, I use the converting cable from s-video.com, which costs about $17-$20.

Oh yeah, and for comparsion, a Windows Pentium III 800MHz computer (Dell Dimension 4100) runs ZSNES at 59FPS with Super 2xsai turned on.
My benchmarks are very unscientific though. The OS was changed for each test.

If you're making something like a NES PC to play emulated games on, you can get away without a hard drive if you use Linux.

I was considering that. Or possibly using a battery of USB Flash Drives as opposed to a large hard drive.

if you could mount a usb drive inside a cart, and then manage to line up the usb port with the cart slot... that would be really cool

Or if you're completely insane, rewire the pins of a USB flash drive to the cartridge slot pins, then rewire the corresponding cartridge slot pins to the USB port.
But then you'd have to blow on it to get it to work.