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Star Kade: A Raspberry Pi Arcade

Zinger19

By Zinger19
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Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Just thought I'd share my latest littile build i did. It's full fledged gaming machine in an NES cart

I took an NES cart and modified it. Then took a raspberry pi and removed some components to shrink it down. Soldered some new USB ports to fit in the cart, and bypassed the micro usb power port so it can be plugged in the front. Cut some slots for hdmi and a place in the back to remove the SD card if ever needed.

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Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Nice modding skills!

Thanks

I have one of these little boards and I've been wondering what the hell to do with it! Great work here.

Did you see Ben Heck's take on this - he was pulling components off the board like you've done here too

http://technabob.com/blog/2013/07/01/ben-heck-raspberry-pi-portable/

Yes I did see the show. Its actually where I got the idea to strip it down. I was going to try and squeeze it into an NES controller but figured that might be pushing it a bit. Over all it was pretty fun and turned out better than expected. It runs a lot of emulators pretty well...minus the FX chipped Snes games.

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Simply amazing,how's we'll does it run? and what happens when you turn it on has it got a front end?

Quite well actually. When it's powered on it loads some txt and then boots the splash screen. You can actually disable all the boot up text, but when I did it messed up the loading progress and would get stuck on the splash screen until you hit F4. After that it loads into emulationstation which is the frontend. It came preloaded with games like doom,duke nukem,cave story and a few computer emulators. I removed all of those except for cave story. I've run gameboy, gameboy color,nintendo, Snes,turbo graphics 16, and if I can ever figure out how to configure the controls for sega then that as well. There are other emulators but given the processor It wouldn't handle most very well. When I finish setting it up I'll post a video of it in action.

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Wow that has surprised me in how much it can run! Can't wait to see the video

Yeah it was to me as well. I Haven't had a chance to try it yet but I've heard The FX chips games won't run on it which is really no surprise.

What controllers are you going to use?

Snes controllers with retro usb chips.

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

blacketj Newbie

blacketj

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Snes controllers with retro usb chips..

A little bit of a stylistic mis-match between the NES cartridge and the SNES controllers, but very understandable that you want the functionality that the SNES controllers offer.

I recently converted a SNES controller to USB with a Teensy board. It is a ton of fun to play with. For me the 360 controller just feels too stiff when I'm playing the classic games.

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Agreed. If this build were for me I would of just kept it to Nintendo. Since it's for a friend I decided to add as many games as possible. So I needed a controller to that would give me the most for what I needed and since I had them I used them.To try and compensate for that though I replaced the A and B buttons with red NES ones. Like I did here in my Spintendo build. IMAG0086.jpg

So stylistic mismatch...absolutley! A more system compatible design would have been to use an SNES cart, but I wanted a way to easily remove the SD card.

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blacketj Newbie

blacketj

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Wow, I missed the removable SD card feature. That is really slick.

So did you measure and/or test it out? You can really cram a raspberry pi in a SNES cartridge?

That would almost tempt me to put together something like this, but if it is true that it can't do FX games, then that would be a deal breaker for me. Maybe raspberry pi 2.0

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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As far as measurements go...I pretty much just eyeballed it. The SD card is pretty much lined up perfectly. It's almost like it was meant to be there. lol

These are what I have tested fairly quickly. They seemed to run flawlessly.

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Here is the first test video I did while building it. It's strictly just NES games because originally that's all it was going to be used for. Also note Bump and Jump wasn't the best video showing the controller in action, but I'm sure you get the idea. Oh yeah the no sound is do to me using a monitor without speakers. The sound does work.

I'll test out more over the weekend.

It should be able to fit in a Sega cart so yeah you can def use an SNES cart. I wouldn't let let a few games not working deter you from not building one. I have seen some psx games run on it such as chrono cross. You could always try a beaglebone black or some other small arm pc.

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  • 1 year later...
HazzardActual Newbie

HazzardActual

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a year later and that thing holds true. Were you running emulation station the whole time or is that an upgrade? Ive got a Pi with a busted SD slot, you've inspired me to pull it out and order another part for it.

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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I've always ran retropie as the OS. It has emulationstation and all the emulators built in. I was running ver 1.8, but upgraded to 2.3 in which they did an upgrade on everything. Emulationstation runs very smooth and has built in Rom scraper for images and meta data.

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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Pi's are all the same CPU speed @ 700mhz. Model A has 256 ram and model b has 512...not sure if B+ has more ram or not. But it has 4 USB ports You can also look into banana pi which has dual core 1ghz or a hummingboard with a dual or quad. You can swap the hummingboards processor out as well. That will prob be my next credit card sized pc.

SIMPLYAUSTIN Newbie

SIMPLYAUSTIN

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Great work... I love what you have done.

Is there any heat issues when running more intense games and if required could you add another emu of your choice to the configuration you talked about? Say for example use RetroArch version on the Pie?

Zinger19 Newbie

Zinger19

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No heat issues. I have a 2v overclock and its running @ 900mghz fine. I actually bought some cooling fins to bump up the speed a bit ith a 6v overclock @ 1ghz to see if there is a speed difference in the fx chipped or ps1 games.

SIMPLYAUSTIN Newbie

SIMPLYAUSTIN

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Just looking now at the banana pi. Looks like this could be really interesting. Nice specs for a tiny pc.

You have much trouble with making it a small form factor?

Keep me up to date with the overclock too, in hooked!

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