Category Archives: nintendo hacks

Now, Finally, We Can Play With Power

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

In case you’re not a ’90s kid, the Nintendo Power Glove is the greatest device for human-computer interaction ever created. It’s so good, they called it bad, and then they made a movie about it. At its heart, the Power Glove is just some force sensors in the fingers of a glove, but that hasn’t stopped hackers from cracking these gloves open for years. We’ve seen the Power Glove used in Hackaday Prize entries before, we’ve seen it control quadcopters, we’ve seen it used as a Vive controller, and the Ultimate Power Glove comes loaded up with Bluetooth, motion …read more

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Posted in 2018 Hackaday Prize, nintendo hacks, nintendo power glove, power glove, The Hackaday Prize, wearable hacks | Leave a comment

Dumping A Zelda SNES ROM, And Learning A Few Things Along The Way

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

For many of us, being given a big old DIP ROM from nearly thirty years ago and being told to retrieve its contents would be a straightforward enough task. We’d simply do what we would have done in the 1980s, and hook up its address lines to a set of ports, pull its chip select line high, and harvest what came out of the data lines for each address.

But imagine for a minute that an old-fashioned parallel ROM is a component you aren’t familiar with, as [Brad Dettmer] did with the ROM from a SNES Zelda cartridge. We’ve seen …read more

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Posted in nintendo hacks, reverse engineer, rom, snes, zelda | Leave a comment

Metroid, Zelda, and Castelvania Auto-Mapped with NES Emulation & Heuristics

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

The NES was one of the flagship consoles of the glorious era that was the 1980s. Many of the most popular games on the platform involved some sort of adventure through scrolling screens — Metroid, Super Mario, and Zelda all used this common technique. For many games, keeping track of the map was a huge chore and meant mapping by hand on graph paper or using the screenshots published in Nintendo Power magazine. These day’s there’s a better way. [Daniel] set out to automatically map these huge two-dimensional worlds, developing software he calls WideNES to do it.

WideNES is an …read more

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Posted in emulation, emulator, nes, nintendo, nintendo hacks, software hacks | Leave a comment

Using Modern Nintendo Controllers On The C64

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

There are plenty of people out there who still enjoy playing games on vintage computers like the Commodore 64. But while they likely return to these classic games themselves out of a sense of nostalgia, the feeling doesn’t always extend to the hardware itself. For example, one can enjoy playing Impossible Mission without having to use a contemporary C64 joystick.

Thanks to an open source project developed by [Robert Grasböck], C64 owners who want to take advantage of the improvements made to gaming controllers in the nearly 40 years since the system’s release now have another option. Called Nunchuk64, it …read more

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Posted in adapter, classic hacks, commodore 64, nes classic edition, nintendo, nintendo hacks, retrocomputing, wii | Leave a comment

PC in an SNES Case is a Weirdly Perfect Fit

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

For better or for worse, a considerable number of the projects we’ve seen here at Hackaday can be accurately summarized as: “Raspberry Pi put into something.” Which is hardly a surprise, the Pi is so tiny that it perfectly lends itself to getting grafted into unsuspecting pieces of consumer tech. But we see far fewer projects that manage to do the same trick with proper x86 PC hardware, but that’s not much of a surprise either given how much larger a motherboard and its components are.

So this PC built into a Super Nintendo case by [NoshBar] is something …read more

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Posted in casemod, classic hacks, computer hacks, mini-itx, nintendo, nintendo hacks, noctua, snes | Leave a comment

Thinking Inside The (Cardboard) Box With Nintendo Labo Hacks

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

Cardboard is one of the easiest ways to build something physical, far easier than the 3D printing and laser cutting we usually write about here. So when Nintendo released their Labo line of cardboard accessories, it doesn’t take a genius to predict the official product would be followed by a ton of user creations. Nintendo were smart enough to provide not only an internet forum for this creativity to gather, they also hold contests to highlight some of the best works.

The most impressive projects in the winner’s circle combined the one-of-a-kind cardboard creations with custom software written using Toy-Con …read more

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Posted in cardboard, cardboard box, contest, contests, joy-con, Labo, nintendo, nintendo hacks, Nintendo Switch, switch | Leave a comment

N64 Emulated in VR Makes Hyrule go 3D

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

The Nintendo 64 had some groundbreaking and popular 3D games, and [Avaer Kazmer] felt it was only right to tamper with things just enough to trick an emulator into playing Ocarina of Time in VR, complete with stereoscopic 3D. The result is more than just running an emulator on a simulated screen in virtual reality; the software correctly renders a slightly different perspective of the world of Hyrule to each eye in order to really make the 3D pop in a way the original never could, and make it playable with VR controllers in the process. The VR emulator solution …read more

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Posted in emukit, exokit, Games, mixed reality, n64, nintendo, nintendo hacks, ocarina of time, Virtual Reality, Vive, vr | Leave a comment

Nintendo Switch Gets Internal Trinket Hardmod

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

If you haven’t been following the Nintendo Switch hacking scene, the short version of the story is that a vulnerability was discovered that allows executing code on all versions of the Switch hardware and operating system. In fact, it’s believed that the only way to stop this vulnerability from being exploited is for Nintendo to release a new revision of the hardware. Presumably there are a lot of sad faces in the House of Mario right about now, but it’s good news for us peons who dream of actually controlling the devices we purchase.

To run your own code on …read more

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Posted in adafruit, Games, hardware, nintendo hacks, Nintendo Switch, recovery mode, trinket m0 | Leave a comment

Reverse-Emulating NES: Nintendception!

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

This is a stellar hack, folks. [Tom7] pulled off both full-motion video and running a Super Nintendo game on a regular old Nintendo with one very cute trick. And he gives his presentation of how he did it on the Nintendo itself — Nintendo Power(point)! The “whats” and the “hows” are explained over the course of two videos, also embedded below.

In the first, he shows it all off and gives you the overview. It’s as simple as this: Nintendo systems store 8×8 pixel blocks of graphics for games on their ROM cartridges, and the running program pulls these up …read more

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Posted in nes, nintendo hacks, Raspberry Pi, snes, SNES emulator | Leave a comment

Beat This Mario Block Like it Owes You Money

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

People trying to replicate their favorite items and gadgets from video games is nothing new, and with desktop 3D printing now at affordable prices, we’re seeing more of these types of projects than ever. At the risk of painting with too broad a stroke, most of these projects seem to revolve around weaponry; be it a mystic sword or a cobbled together plasma rifle, it seems most gamers want to hold the same piece of gear in the physical world that they do in the digital one.

But [Jonathan Whalen] walks a different path. When provided with the power to …read more

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Posted in mario, nintendo hacks, prop building, vibration sensor | Leave a comment