Killing time...and other things.

So now that I got my anger out of the way...I guess this is kind of a common problem with this model. Wish I had know this earlier of course. But anyway I initiated a support ticket from zotac...and of course it's all just a waiting game. I'm sure they'll want me to pull the battery, reset the bios, and all that jazz...only to have it not work of course. Then I'm sure they'll send me an RMA and I'll be waiting some more. To make matters worse...they probably won't even send me the same board because they no longer sell this one. So as I wait(because there's no sense in doing a mod without a system to test it on) I stumbled up an interesting website. Some of you may have seen this before...and some of you have not.

It's called NESForver. Basically in a nutshell it's a place where you can play classic NES games online. So there's no need to search for roms or emulators or ask where to get them. You play the games right in your browser which I think is pretty neat. You'll need Java installed in order to get this to work. Now I experienced some slow down, but I'm willing to bet that it's my laptop. You should def check it out though.

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R.I.P. Spintendo

Well Im not sure whether to be really sad or really angry. I dont know what happened here. Two days ago it was running fine with no problems...but now it will power on but no video will come up. I've tried both the dvi and hdmi and both give me the same result...nothing. I've tried unhooking everything one at a time to troubleshoot and I still get nothing. I'm so frustrated because I've put so much effort and $ into this thing only to have the motherboard die!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...hhhh...hh.h.......

Well back to the drawing board I guess. If you have any ideas please hit me up.

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N64 Goodness

Well it went alot easier than anticipated. The chip works wonderfully. I have to admit my soldering is getting a lot cleaner as well. If you're looking to go the USB route...I highly recommend this chip. You can grab it from www.raphnet.net .

Flip the controller over and remove the 9 screws. There are 7 on the backside

And here are the other 2 are where the memory pack goes. Be careful with these because the strip easisly.

This is what you will see when your case is open

Cut your wire from the where its connected to the board to about 3 inches up. You'll want to have enough wire to move the chip where you want.

Next comes the fun part. There are only 3 wires for the N64 controller. If you look closely at the board you can see where the + and - go. The last tab on the right of the chip is where your 3.3v+ wire (red) will go. Right next to it goes the negative wire (black). Now take your last wire (white) and solder it to the second tab. The very top tab is used for the 5 volt wire for the Gamecube, but since we are using an N64 controller we won't be needing it. Now that your controller is soldered you will need to solder the NES cord. There are also + and - signs and there is a G and W for the USB wires. Everything is still color coded just like the keyboard cord. Which is...

NES USB

Brown = Red +
Yellow = Black -
Orange = Green data
Red = White data

Cover the connections with hot glue on both sides to ensure that they won't break off. Once you've done that find a place to put it.

I put mine in the bottom left hand corner between the 2 screw holes.

Lastly, reassemble everything and this is what you will end up with

Finally you can test you controller out. Plug it in to one of the front ports.

Windows will start installing the new hardware. So to see if everything installed correctly you will want to open your Control Panel and then click view hardware and devices and then this will pop up.

You should see GC/N64_USB. You'll need to open the properties to the controller and config the analog stick. If you don't do this then your your stick won't work like it should.

And the most fun part of all...Play some games!

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