NES PC Gaming Mod

[Aharami]

very nice! third video is pure awesome!

 

[leeland]

marked

 

[ViviTheMage]

sweeeeeet

Those videos were great...definitely an AWESOME buildup.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

awesome project

 

[Barfo]

Video made me happy, thanks OP

 

[buddman]

Appreciate the kudos all.

 

[mcvickj]

Amazing work!

 

[coloumb]

Awesome! I hadn't realized there were 700+ games (I did hear that correctly?). Now all you need to do is convince nintendo to mass produce your design

 

[sjwaste]

Watched the 3rd video. Nicely done, that does look awesome.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Did you make the menu system yourself? If so.. that must have taken ages, but kudos dude, huge nerd credit.

 

[punjabiplaya]

OP, you should contact Nintendo since it's the NES's 25th anniversary.

 

[apac]

OP, you should contact Nintendo since it's the NES's 25th anniversary.

Agree. This its an amazing project. I bet the folks at Nintendo would love to see, and possibly have you demo your build.

 

[fatpat268]

OP, you should contact Nintendo since it's the NES's 25th anniversary.

Agree. This its an amazing project. I bet the folks at Nintendo would love to see, and possibly have you demo your build.

Yes, because nintendo would love to showcase a NES themed PC that plays roms...

To the OP. That's an awesome little pc. I've been contemplating for years to do something similar and create a emulation box, perhaps even an arcade cabinet. Never got around to it though. :\

 

[buddman]

Awesome! I hadn't realized there were 700+ games (I did hear that correctly?). Now all you need to do is convince nintendo to mass produce your design

Yeah - there are probably 800 games for the NES total, but I did not include the Zapper games, Rob the Robot games, and European and Japanese games. And it saved me from finding another 100 images and videos for those games.

 

[meltdown75]

i finally had a chance to watch the videos... amazing stuff. well done!!!

 

[Adrenaline]

I want one.

 

[buddman]

Did you make the menu system yourself? If so.. that must have taken ages, but kudos dude, huge nerd credit.

Hyperspin is the front-end (aka, the menu system). So I didn't "make" it per say, but I did have to build the menu database, have the images for the box art, wheel, and even themes match the database, have the videos match the database, make my own intro video to the menu system, and also shell the front-end into Windows - add to that, scripting so that I could load the games from the menu and find a way to make it to where no keyboard and mouse are needed - I would think the best way to state it is that I customized it to fit my needs.

 

[Fenixgoon]

that's awesome!

do you have to worry about part temps at all between the hdd inside the cartridge and mounting the mobo upside down?

 

[buddman]

Well, I tested the system for weeks with Prime95 to see what temps would do with full load, even though realistically it never works that much when playing the games. After I had fitted nylon spacers on the feet, my CPU temps would never go above 55 degrees C on full load.

But in normal operation, CPU temp is around 35-45 C. Ambient temp doesn't go above that, so even though the HD is sitting directly above the motherboard proc socket (which tends to be the hottest thing on the mobo), it doesn't really get hot at all. Of course, it being a SSD helps a bunch too since there are no moving parts.

 

[Barfo]

Do you ever use it for anything other than playing NES games?

 

[Fenixgoon]

Well, I tested the system for weeks with Prime95 to see what temps would do with full load, even though realistically it never works that much when playing the games. After I had fitted nylon spacers on the feet, my CPU temps would never go above 55 degrees C on full load.

But in normal operation, CPU temp is around 35-45 C. Ambient temp doesn't go above that, so even though the HD is sitting directly above the motherboard proc socket (which tends to be the hottest thing on the mobo), it doesn't really get hot at all. Of course, it being a SSD helps a bunch too since there are no moving parts.

ah very nice! :thumbsup:

 

[buddman]

Do you ever use it for anything other than playing NES games?

Well, I've only had the box completed for about 2 weeks now, but I don't think I will have it do anything else other than play NES games. I know it looks to be a waste of the system's full potential, but Hyperspin does take a considerable amount of resources to run. While it is possible, I just think that if I did have it do anything else, like stream media, etc, that it would just cheapen it. I built it out of my nostalgia for the NES.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

can you save games on the fly?

also if the system locks up do you pull the cartridge out and blow on it?

 

[buddman]

can you save games on the fly?

also if the system locks up do you pull the cartridge out and blow on it?

I could have set it up to do save states - but the design was based around getting it as close as possible to what an original NES would do. So no save states.

Haha, I wish I could have made a way to blow into the cartridge. But if the system locks up, just do what you would do on the original NES - hit the reset button (which really does reset the system), or hit the power button (slightly different since you have to hold it down a few seconds to hard-power-off the machine). The only drawback is that if Windows does not shut down, upon boot up you get that annoying "Start Windows Normally" wait screen. I'll figure out how to get rid of that later on though.

That being said, my fiancé and I played a few games this weekend for 3 hours straight on the system and didn't encounter any issues. I used her and other friends to test the box (among other stress tests - like running Prime95 in the background continually while running Hyperspin and games) to basically see if they could crash it or encounter some issue that I didn't foresee. It's very stable.

 

[buddman]

Happy 25th Bday to the NES - may it have many more.