Hobbyist grinds down fashioned chips by hand to construct a Sport Boy-sized NES

the staunch article —

“This is now not emulation, it is now not a Pi, it is now not a NOAC, and it is now not an FPGA.”

When you occur to would care for a moveable console that can play feeble Nintendo Entertainment System games, the top possible likelihood is tool emulation, whether or now not you are using Nintendo’s first rate Switch app, a moveable PC, or some low-cost knockoff emulator handheld. When you occur to desire greater accuracy than tool emulation can present, there’s continuously the Analogue Pocket, which is willing to (with present firmware) re-intention the NES in hardware using its FPGA chip.

But some purists are murky with the rest varied than fashioned hardware—that’s the top possible imaginable clarification for projects care for the TinyTendo, which works to unprecedented lengths to squeeze a total NES correct into a moveable equipment roughly the dimensions and weight of the feeble grey monochrome Sport Boy. The mission is the advent of hardware modder Redherring32, who in the slay plans to begin-provide the mission.

For miniaturization projects care for this, you continually detect chopped-up or totally personalized-printed circuit boards worn with the fashioned chips to contort the hardware correct into a new shape. This landscape orientation mod for the fashioned Sport Boy or the fashioned Analogue NT are both factual examples. But extra drastic measures were desired to squeeze a total NES correct into a handheld console, most seriously the elimination of stout pins and ceramic that the fashioned chips all exhaust.

“TinyTendo utilizes staunch NES chips which had been bodily minimize and floor down smaller,” wrote Redherring32. “A easy accelerate down is that I sand away the underside of the chip till I hit the die and leads, then I minimize the chip smaller with a Dremel. The cease end result is 10x10x2mm, and floor mountable.”

Soldering the hand-minimize chips to a personalised PCB creates a truly purposeful NES board that’s “smaller than a Raspberry Pi 3,” though the construct furthermore integrates a energy management PCB, a button PCB, and varied boards for audio and varied capabilities. The console has a built-in LCD camouflage, costs over USB-C, and plays  miniaturized (non-fashioned) game cartridges, though chunky-size carts could furthermore be played with an adapter.

The shrink back of this mission is that it requires the sacrifice of an exact NES to construct it work. This prototype modified into made of an NES with a “very damaged motherboard,” and we would reduction anyone who wants to construct their relish to reap ingredients from non-purposeful consoles in desire to destroying functioning hardware.

Redherring32 is accountable for several varied modding and preservation projects, collectively with begin provide PCB designs for the fashioned entrance– and high-loading NES motherboards and the “PicoPad,” a purposeful controller that’s considerably smaller than the connector that plugs it into the NES.

Itemizing image by Redherring32/Twitter