New Site Down

The new site is currently down. I went to upload a new single page, and wasn't thinking and uploaded the whole old site. Which ended up breaking the wordpress install. It will be back eventually. I've been wanting to move away from using wordpress as a website(it will still be used for the blog) anyw...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Chips Ahoy!

Well here it is. The chip I've been waiting for. This is the chip that will allow me to convert the N64 controller to USB...or in my case NSB. It also works with gamecube controllers as well. I'm sure Ill be busy working on this come tomorrow someti...

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I just got Zapped!

No it wasn't an electric shock I just received. It's the Nintendo ZAPPER!!!! Yeah! Just picked one of these up while I'm waiting for my N64 chip to come. Which should be sometime next week. Ahhhh... the good old Nintendo Zapper. Not only did it look awesome, but the trigger clicking was amazing. To rig this bad boy up to the NES I'll be using the AimTrak kit from Ultimarc So it should be epic to say the least. In other news...I'm considering(which...

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Coming Soon...To an NES near me

Just a quick heads up. Tonight I just purchased the N64 usb chip from http://www.raphnet.net . It sure beats paying $70 for one off of ebay. I'm pretty pumped and I'm hopin it will install just as smoothly as the ones from retrousb did. Tomorrow I'll be heading out to a flea market to hopefully pick up a controller or 2. As always I'll go through the install. See you th...

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Transmutation Part 1 1/2

The keyboard is now fully assembled and here are the final results. I soldered the NES cord to the keyboard USB cable. The wires are soldered as follows: USB ---- NES Cord Red ---- Brown Green -- Orange White -- Red Black -- Yellow The white wire is not connected to anything so its taped off. The wires are all now taped individually with electrical tape, and then all are wrapped together. Once everything is secure,reassemble the keyboard. With...

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NSB Transmutation Part 1

Well I can now say that it's officially been done. I now have a working NSB keyboard. It's done and working perfectly. The first thing I did was cut the previous USB port that I had on the bottom of the NES. I stripped the wires down exposing the red,black,white,and green wires. I stripped a little bit off of each wire and added some solder and set it aside. I took my NES controller wire and did the same. I then pulled out my NES Female ports...

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NSB Connection

So I'm seriously thinking about converting my USB ports into NSB ports. What the heck is an NSB port you ask? Well it's essentially a USB connection where the female connection of the USB is the NES female port. Therefore all external USB connections will be required to have a male NES cord. I dont think its ever been done before. At least not that I know of. I can't really think of any reason why it wouldn't work, because all I'm doing is making the connection. This also means that I'm going to have to get 2 more retro kits, and make each controller...

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USB Ports

I added some USB ports on the bottom so I can set everything up. I got tired of opening up the case to work on the setup so I added these to make things easier. ...

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Back at last

Finally after a nice long break I'm ready to get back at it. Today I mounted the hard drive inside the NES cartridge. It's one of the final steps I needed to make in order to make the system complete. Here's some pictures of the mounting process I made a quick cut out of the hard drive I then laid the cut out on top of the hard drive, and took a paper clip and poked holes into the bottom screw holes of the hard drive. With your template made, place...

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Small Set Back

For over a month my project has been a stand still. I recently had a power supply and partial motherboard failure on my main computer. Luckily I am still able to access most of my files, but as you can imagine it has kind of put a damper on things. The Spintendo is working out nicely though and havent really run in to too many problems. Except with the hdmi cable cutting out because its cheap and was bent at a really odd angle. To solve that problem though I purchased a 360 degree swivel hdmi port and it seems to be working alot better. I am thinking...

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NTV

I've been busy working on a main theme for the Video Game Cartoons wheel. I call it NTV and have designed it after MTV from the early 90's. The logo in fact is designed after the MTV logo. Now I wasn't really in to MTV all that much growing up, but 2 obnoxious characters come to mind when I think of 90's television...Beavis and Butt-head or what I like to call them now...Buttario and Beavwigi. So without further delay...Here's a quick shot of what...

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Update

It's been a few weeks since I last posted. I wanted to post a lot more but sometimes life comes at you fast. It's kinda hard to get anything done with a 6 month old crawling around. Some things that's I've accomplished so far. I ended up installing windows 7 on it because I couldn't get windows xp to install via usb. Since it has SATA and not IDE I couldn't just simply use a cd drive to install the OS...well I could of but I didn't want to spend...

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Retro Conversion

If you have been following along you should remember that one of the things I wanted to accomplish was converting an SNES Controller to work with the system ports. Well, I've successfully managed to do so with ease. Desolder your NES controller like so. All you have to do is heat up the solder and the and pull the wires out. They will come out relatively easy. You now have the cable you will be using to for the SNES controller. Take the SNES...

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