DIY Live » Gaming

Ten mods for NES controller

Greg Lipscomb — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:39:13 +0000

Here is a quick list of ten mods for the NES controller. There are lots of cool, and even lots of pointless things that can be done. It is amazing to see all of the innovative ideas.
1. NES Remote Control: Here is a NES controller mod that takes a TV remote control, and sticks it inside a nintendo controller. It actually works as a functioning remote.

2. NES mouse: This guy stuck an infrared mouse inside the casing of an old NES controller. The A button functions as the left mouse click, and the B button functions as the right mouse click. It is held and moved like a normal mouse. not very ergonomic, but functional.

3. NES USB Controller: Here is a mod that uses a microcontroller, and actually converts the NES controller to USB, so it can be used as a gamepad controller on a PC. You can play your favorite NES games on a PC emulator with it.

4.NES controller for pocket pc This mod makes an infrared NES controller for a pocket PC. He actually takes an Infrared keyboard, and wires his controller to it, so that he can play his favorite games wirelessly, well sort of.
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5.Wireless Bluetooth Handset: This mod takes a bluetooth headset from a cell phone, and places it inside a NES controller. Don’t ask me why, but it is cool. If you hit start, it will turn it on or off. I guess you would hold it like a phone.

6. NES mp3 player: Here is an mp3 player placed inside of a NES controller.

7. NES SD/CF Card Reader: Here is a cool mod that places a compact flash card reader inside of a NES controller. Not much modding involved, so a pretty simple mod.

8. World’s Smallest NES Controller This is actually pretty neat. I don’t see how it is usable, but it seems to function. They basically use all of the NES controller hardware, but make a new tiny circuit board for the buttons. It still has the huge project box. It is more for shock factor I guess.

9. NES parallel port controller: Here is a good mod on how to connect a NES controller to a parallel port on a pc. This is a much easier task than using USB. The only problem is that you can not get the 5v from the parallel port, so you have to find a way to power the controller. There are surely easier ways than connecting batteries to it. I am sure you can feed off of the power supply from the PC. You could prob. steal power from the keyboard port.

10. Wireless NES controller for computer: This mod takes a wireless keypad, and places that circuitry inside of a NES controller. This is a pretty cool mod, except for the fact that you can only press one button at a time. I am sure there are better ways to do this, but this is probably one of the cheapest and easiest.

Programming for Atari 2600

Greg Lipscomb — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:57:30 +0000

I found this gem from one of my readers over at brainwagon.org He figured out how to program the Atari 2600, which is not an easy task. He made a game that emulates the WWII German encrypter machine called the Enigma. For a little bit of history, an Enigma was a device that the Germans used to encrypt messages. It was electric, and had 3 rollers on it. Depending on how the rollers were turned determined how the encryption was typed. It literally looked like a typewriter. It was an electrical mechanical device. When being used, the electricity would flow through the rotors, and that would set up the encryption. The German’s plan failed when an Enigma machine was found by someone in Poland, which was then forwarded to the British. A British mathmetician figured out how the machine worked, and was able to break the code. This allowed the British to stop the German advance.

As far as the Atari game goes, Mark gives a good podcast that goes into great detail about how to program the Atari 2600, and what he did to learn how to do it. He used the Stella Atari 2600 emulator to test his creation. After he got his creation to work on Stella, he decided to get an EEPROM burner from Mcumall, as well as an Atari PC board that accepts an EEPROM. He did his assembly in p65, which is a 6502 assembler written in perl

I am sure there are some other cool uses for the Atari PC boards. I think you could burn a rom onto them, and play it on your old atari. If anyone has any experience in that, then let me know. Anyway, check out brainwagon.org, and you can see his finished article here Note, he did this over several posts, so if you search for his projects, you can find and read all about it.

DIY pong game

Greg Lipscomb — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:19:43 +0000

Well, here is yet another cornell project. Why am I still using them? Because they are cool, and complex, and I really want to make one of these. They use an atmel mega 32 microcontroller. They program the entire game, including the video output to control a television. This is the game that I would love to make. They even made their own controllers. You can see this next picture is a pic of their circuit board.

It is not that complex of a circuit, but if you look at the code, you see it is really hard. They use bitmaps to create the components that move, and they have a bouncing ball program, and just build it from there. You have to keep track of the ball, by giving it coordinates, and if your coordinates match that of one of your paddles, you know to bounce it back at a certain angle. I would love to make this, because it was the beginning of all of our gaming. Anyway, go see the link here for a thorough walkthrough of how it is done.
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How to make your own Duck Hunt video game

Greg Lipscomb — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 06:05:51 +0000

This is one of the coolest things that I have seen in a while. This is way beyond my abilities, of course, I have never taken a class in video output. These guys for an electrical engineering assignment at cornell university, reproduced their own version of the old NES duck hunt. They used two micro controllers, and wrote all of the program that they needed to play the game, and out put it to a video. I plan on getting my own microcontroller writer for christmas, and maybe, I can figure out some of this stuff. My first project would be something easy like pong. But this gives a very thorough walk through on how you could do this yourself. They even have the code to download if you can’t program.

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Build your own Sega genesis cartridge

Greg Lipscomb — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 22:33:27 +0000

How cool would it be to make your own NES cartridges, and use it in your old console. This would be a tough project, and I don’t have the time to tackle it, but if anyone knows of it being done, let me know. I made my own circuit board one time, a long time ago. I wanted to make an external memory source for my TI-89 graphing calculator. I just drew the traces onto the copper, and etched away the remaing material. It was pathetic, and I got it all wrong. You have to print the traces on a special iron on material. I may do that next time. I did use to coop for NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX, and I worked on a robotic astronaut called ROBO-naut. I made a 6 layer circuit board for a motor controller in the wrist of the robot. I used Orcad layout to set the traces. It is a powerful program, I would love to get my hands on that software, but it is pretty expensive. One day, I will show a picture of the circuit board that I designed. But check out this guy’s cartridge that he made. I really want to try to get some good mods, and how-to projects to show, so if any of you have any that you would like to share, then send them my way. I will put them on my site, and give you the credit you deserve. Go to my “submit news” tab.
Here is the link to the site

raphnet.net

Play mario brothers on your ipod.

Greg Lipscomb — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:29:12 +0000

Here is a hack that will let you play your old gameboy games on your ipod. Very cool!!!

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