Saturday 28 June 2014

Huh. I think I could build an NES-compatible joypad.

More interestingly I think I could adapt it to make it compatible with my arcade stick.  Not directly relevant to the Super Famicom, but it looks like that uses a similar approach to it's joypads.

So I think the practical upshot is that I could wire all the buttons in the stick to, say, a DB15 connector, and then connect that to a different controller board allowing me to use a real arcade stick across different home computer platforms.

Sunday 22 June 2014

So, for the princely sum of about 14 pounds from eBay, I bought a Super Famicom.  Broken, no cables or controllers or anything.  I had a lot of reasons for wanting a Super Famicom, among them the idea of refurbishing the shell and using it as a home for a Raspberry Pi SNES emulator, worst case scenario.

Higher up the scale was the thought of poking around inside it and maybe getting it working again, but since I have a PAL Super Nintendo, if the hardware inside was completely shot, it wasn't really a major concern.  At the very least I'd probably be able to salvage the controller ports, the Multi-AV port and the shell and that'd be plenty to be getting on with.

On arrival, the shell wasn't in great condition, but I kinda knew that from the photos.  It was slightly worse than I'd thought, but no fault to the seller, mostly because I hadn't been paying much attention to the auction (more fool me).  The top shell is pretty yellowed, has a number of cracks, there's a not unsizeable hole in the back through which I can see a little corrosion on the metal shielding around the SPC unit, but it hasn't daunted me too much, I always knew this was going to be a fixer-upper.

I suppose I'd better see if I can find the Gamebit screwdrivers I own, or get back onto Ebay to order some new ones. I'm not sure I ever had the larger one. But one interesting piece of news is that it DOES seem to power up, at least, so whatever the fault(s) may be, it's not with the power-in jack or the microfuse.