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• 16May 12

  Max Payne 3!

  

  Some of you may be thinking that this blog is a little bit late, but I like to think that I was too busy playingf Max Payne than to bother with this blog post till now.

  As you can see, I got it at midnight, (just barely, as I decided to buy it at 10pm that night), and then as we were waiting in line the 5 hour energy guys came by and gave out free 5 hour energys. It was a sweet deal all around. I, just because I could decided that it was a great idea to speed ball 5 hour energy and a "BFC" Monster! Lets just say it had little noticable effect on me except that I stayed up to until 8am. It was quite fun, but I needed a little bit of sleep before work.

  Mostly all of my free time has been spent playing, and I think it is a great game. I just need to get XBL Gold again so I can take advantage of the multiplayer. If you haven't picked up this game, I highly reccomend it.

  • Posted May 16, 2012 11:29 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 23Apr 12

  NES-PC v2.0 Part 1

  The History of my NES-PC v1.0

  

  (This picture is from before I removed the CD drive, in case you were wondering)

  A few years ago I got the idea to build an NES-PC. Actually, more accurately, my girlfriends brother and I started talking about it, and I, being myself, decided that it was a great idea. After a length of time passed, I forget how long, I finally decided to get serious about it. I researched parts I would need and sourced an NES to hack apart. Being that I finished building it and posted pictures on GameSpot in September of 2009, it was hideously underpowered. Given that when I built it, I wanted it to be the cleanest build out there (my research having turned up many crappy thrown together builds out there); I naturally got an itx form factor motherboard, which is only 6.7 inches by 6.7 inches. This is just small enough to fit in an NES case with a very little room to spare.

  The motherboard I got was the Intel D945GCLF. It is an Intel Atom processor based motherboard, running at 1.6 GHz, which was anemic even then. My only saving grace was that there were only two Atom based motherboards out at the time, the D945GCLF and the D945GCLF2, the latter being a dual core Atom based board running at 1.6GHz. I picked the cheaper of the two, because it was $69.00 and I didn?t want to waste too much money on something that I might not even be able to do, but alas, it had Hyper Threading!

  The D945GCLF had only one slot for DDR2 667, and only supported 2 gigs of ram. It also had a PCI slot, two SATA ports, and a PATA connector. The sad part is, if you look at the picture, the passively cooled heat sink is the Atom processor, and the one with the fan is the north bridge! What a joke. Given all of this, and the spatial limitations of the NES, I was doomed from the outset. However, for some reason I continued on my journey.

  Looking at the NES we see that a regular ATX power supply would never fit, as it is almost as big as the NES itself! I briefly toyed with the idea of mounting one on top of the NES like a freaking rooftop a/c unit, but quickly decided that this was a terrible idea. I searched high and low on the Internet and finally came across this thing called a pico-psu. (Spoiler Alert: This was my biggest mistake!) It was billed as the smallest power supply out there, and at 80 watts it was more than sufficient to run my 3-watt Atom processor. I bought it for forty or fifty dollars and was well on my way to building a sweet retro themed rig.

  The next thing on my list was to actually get started and rip an NES apart. It was hard for me, as I don?t usually like to destroy things, especially vintage things that aren?t being made any longer, but 60 million units sold helped me through this. I ripped it apart and started planning out the layout. From the beginning I had wanted it to be self contained, and indistinguishable from a stock unit at a glance. Obviously the missing a/v jacks would give it away, but nobody would notice that at first glance. I removed everything from the case except for the LED, power, and reset buttons, and the controller ports. I then removed almost everything that stuck up with a hacksaw. This was very difficult, but a rotary tool costs too much. (I still haven?t bought one)

  After this I placed the motherboard in the case, and shockingly it didn?t fit! I being myself had a great idea. I could mount a piece of plexi-glass in the case and then mount the board to the plexi-glass with brass standoffs. I?m a sick bastard, I know. I immediately went out and bought the parts and when I got home I realized something. How was I going to figure out where to drill the holes for the standoffs so they would match up with the holes for the board? Eventually I just put the standoffs on the board and laid the precut piece of plexi-glass on it, using a permanent marker to mark the holes. Being as I didn?t have an electric drill, I used an antique hand drill to drill the holes. (Fun fact: The only thing that I used a power tool to do was cut the hole for the 40mm fan in the back.) After this it was fairly easy to figure out where the holes went to mount the motherboard tray in the case, this being a bonus to working with clear materials.

  Next I soldered connectors to the LED, Power button, and Reset button so that they would all work. I could hardly expect people to be impressed if I couldn?t at least figure that much out.

  After I saw that I was making good progress I went out and got a 160 gig laptop hard drive, a standard drive being too big to fit in the case. I ended up using a mounting bracket and mounting it underneath the tray in the corner where the a/v jacks were. The hardest part of the whole project was cutting the hole for the I/O shield. I had to continuously test the hole to make sure I didn?t make it too big, and it was just a pain to cut. After that was finished though, it was just a matter of assembling everything and testing it out. Of course everything worked, so I immediately took everything apart and went back to work. In my constant quest to make my NES-PC the best ever, I had a few other tricks up my sleeves.

  I got an old CD-RW drive out of a laptop and got a slim CD drive to PATA converter and popped it in. The only problem being that I had to mount it somehow. I finally decided to use some heavy duty Velcro and it worked pretty well. It did however mess with the north bridge cooling fan as it was directly on top of it. After that I decided that instead of having useless controller ports, I would make them useful. I only got around to doing one, but I modded it so that it would accept USB devices, which had to be modded as well. I made a mouse with my modded USB NES controller plug. It worked well, and it was even gray and black, so it matched the NES color scheme.

  After putting it all back together I began using it as my everyday PC, as it was freaking awesome to be able to tell people that I was using an NES-PC. It always ran hot, and I had to keep the cartridge bay door open to help cool it. After a while I removed the CD drive to help with cooling, but still it ran hot. Finally I drilled a hole in the back and put a 40mm fan in to try to help exhaust the hot air. That worked fairly well, and I could run it with the door closed.

  It ran well for about six months, and then tragedy struck. Whenever I would do something especially strenuous for the computer, it would restart. At first I though it was a random occurrence, but then it started happening all the time. I finally took it apart and put it in my old Dell case to test it with a bigger power supply, and it worked. Unfortunately for me, I was completely screwed, as I had built it for a pico-psu, and the recently available itx power supplies were way too big to replace it with. This marked the demise of my NES-PC, a crushing blow after all that hard work. I left the parts in the Dell case and put the NES case in storage, where it sat for quite some time. All was not lost however, as you shall see in my next blog. (Spoiler alert: The title of this blog gives it away.)

  Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it/found it useful.

  • Posted Apr 23, 2012 10:25 pm GMT
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• 24Mar 12

  NES-PC v2.0

  It's been a while since I posted anything here, but I've been hard at work on a project that I was talking about a long time ago, and it is now practically finished. If the title of the blog didn't give it away, it is the NES-PC V2.0. It now runs a dual core cpu, 4 gigs of RAM, 160 GB HDD, and a 250 watt itx PSU. I'm planning on using it as an HTPC, so I want to do a few more mods to it. As of right now though, it works. Here's a picture!

  

  Later on I'm going to post a video about it on youtube, but I still need to make it. I have a whole much of pictures from the building process though. Hope you like it!

  • Posted Mar 24, 2012 12:18 am GMT
  • Category: Computers
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