NESPi 2: NES with a ROMs cartridge and original gamepads
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Hey everyone! I've been using Recalbox for the past two weeks and it's been great. I used to run Retropie but this is just much nicer. The menu music, not having any console/verbose showing...it's just beautiful. I want to show you my NES build running it. I wanted to keep it as original as possible. So I'm using the actual Nintendo gamepads from an original NES, kept the A/V ports (though they aren't used at all) and was even able to keep the cartridge function. To use a cartridge, I just opened it and soldered a USB female port to its board. Then I traced those same pins inside the NES slot and soldered a USB cable that plugs into the RPi. After that, I just had to configure Recalbox to mount the flash drive I'm plugging inside the cartridge as the 'share' folder. This allows me to just take the flash drive out of the cartridge, plug it into my PC and load games. Then I can insert the cartridge into the console and boot! I also added a wifi dongle as a backup option, so I can copy games that way. They actually copy into the flash drive inside the cartridge
Using a Mausberry circuit, I kept the original power and reset buttons, and the LED on the front. So when I plug in and power the console, it works as close to an original NES as possible (for example, if there's no cartridge, Recalbox displays an error saying no emulators are installed!). I'm really happy with the result, as I had wanted to do something like this for years! I uploaded a video of it to my Youtube channel, it's in Spanish but I added English subtitles. I have a lot of footage showing it in more detail, which I didn't include in this video but would gladly make another one if you want! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nuE8DDDd2o Pictures are also attached, and feel free to ask any questions you might have about it! I hope more people start using this great system Happy holidays! -
Wow, very great project. Good job! It looks close to the original NES feeling. Love it
