Here are two pictures of my next project:


Can you guess what I'm going to do with these goodies?
That's right, I will be building a retro gaming computer using my favorite mini-itx board the D201GLY2, and my trusty companion that has been in the family for longer than most of my brothers and sisters. The goal with this build is going to be complete sleeper looks. What I mean by that is that the NES will be absolutely indistinguishable from a stock NES, completely stealth. I have seen a lot of NES's built into computers on the web, but none have a completely stock look. In fact the majority look like frankenstein hack jobs. Hopefully mine will only look like that if you open the case. I have some original ideas that will make this build very unique and hopefully pretty gosh dang awesome.

The Goal:
Stealth Install
install all games for all systems(that can be emulated)
Use Existing ports
No visible holes
conenct existing NES ports to USB
allow for 4 controllers (in addition to NES controllers, for N64 Games [smash bros])

The Specs:
Intel D201GLY2A+(video out)
Celeron 220 (1.2Ghz)
Samsung 160GB 2.5" HDD
1GB RAM DDR2

I will post the before pictures of the NES tomorrow with more to come.

what a sweet mod.

i was planning at one time to use my old apple IIe case for an itx mod, but it proved to be too much work, so i'm getting a normal case

OK, here are the pictures of the NES unmodified:





My first task is to disassemble the NES and figure out where I am going to mount the mini-itx board, and find out how I can get all my video audio and power in to the motherboard without destroying the original look, my idea is to use the rear RF connector as a video out via composite, use the existing power connector, and use the video audio side by side rca jacks for audio.

So I started dismantling the NES. First you undo the 6 screws on the bottom and then the lid lifts of very easy, and you are left with this:


Now I took off a few metal back plates, and had this:


Here is the cleared out case:


With the mainboard pulled out you can see the original power and video and audio brackets, I want to use these to give my NES retro gaming computer an authentic look. Here is a picture of the bracket:


After a few minutes with the dremel, I have the bracket cut off the main board, and am ready to wire up the audio, video and power to it!:


Here is the case with the original modded bracket in place:


To mount the hard drive, I dremeled down a post, and then use a wooden peg that fit right into the screw hole of the hard drive to keep it from moving around, then I used some mounting tape to secure the other side, it is in place very tight and will not be coming loose.

Here are a few more pictures.

Here is wiring up the speakers to the rear bracket:


This is how I wired up the front POWER and RESET buttons, the green is power, the blue is reset and the red is the LED. However the old LED must require more power than the motherboard puts out for the LED. Because it wouldn't light up, I had to use a different RED LED off an old case.


Here is another view of the front power switchboard.



This is how I mounted the hard drive, I dremelled down one of the posts, then placed a wooden peg that fit right into the Hard drive hole, that held it in place pretty good, and I used some mounting tape to hold the rest of the hard drive down:



Starting to look pretty good!:



Here are the retrousb adapters that I will rip apart in order to make the front ports work with the computer.



Here is one of them cracked open, I NEED THAT CIRCUIT BOARD!

Please feel free to post here

hi,
is there any way you can perhaps give me a more of a detailed step by step guide. I've always wanted to do something like this and I would like this mod to be my first project.
any help would be appreciated.
thank you and awesome mod.

I've got to say, that is a job well done! The first NES PC I ever did, had the back plate and everything and didn't look as professional as I would have hoped! But I'm going to be building another one, following your example! It will all be internal, and use the outside ports. Still waiting on my parts to get here, but I need to get a Broken NES Console! So until then...

Sorry for the double post, but just one question? What are you using to power up the machine? I mean I know you're using a picoPSU, but what's powering that? You can use the original Power Adapter from the NES? Can you?

Nice work so far - I'm also working on modding an old NES (using the Atom board). It appears that you are using the ports on the side (originally mono audio and video out) as a stereo L&R outputs, then the rear port is for video - all as RCA outputs. How are you modding the onboard video output to the RCA jack?

Grunt

Hi DavGerm4, welcome to the forums.
The pico PSU I bought came in a combo with basically a laptop brick power adapter. I switched the end from the laptop with the one from the original nintendo.

Grunt, Welcom
The motherboard I bought has s-video out, I am then using an s-video to composite adapter to get the signal out, then the rear bracket itself acts as the ground, so I only run one wire out of the motherboard for the video, and one wire out for left and right channels.

Well see, I know you can get a VGA to S-Video Adapter, and I'm thinking about using that to internalize it all! See, the first PC that I put in an NES had a CD Drive. It was a Slimline Drive, used for laptops, and I just got an adapter so that I could plug that into the Motherboard.

The Motherboard I got for this one, is an Intel Atom 230, and the CPU Speed was 1.6GHz. So hopefully that will be good enough for it! Oh, and I'm going to get rid of the RED LED and get a Blue LED installed instead!

So it is for sale!
I had a lot of people contact me asking how to buy this. So I posted it on ebay:

Link:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Retro-NES-Gaming-PC ... 0280144905