A project definitely worth our time is turning a Raspberry Pi into a classic console with the help of emulation. Over the past few months, we've seen some geniuses recreate all kinds of machines using a Pi as the brain. This time, someone decided to take a pretty battered Super Nintendo console and make several modifications to adapt it to the computer.
A Raspberry Pi in a Retro Shell
Take the case of this arcade machine. The final work is extraordinary, and the user opted for a Jamma board to play the game, but nothing stops you from using a Raspberry Pi (another excellent example) for the same purpose. In fact, across the web we can already find distros dedicated to emulating specific consoles, and there's even a special version of MAME that emulates more than a dozen systems. The possibilities are many, the Raspberry Pi keeps gaining performance, and its price hasn't changed, so we only need a bit of time and decide what kind of console we want to recreate. Today, we came across a gallery that shows the transformation of a Super Nintendo into a PI-SNES.
Inside the Modification
At first glance, the inside of the console looks like a plate of spaghetti, but just studying the images for a couple of minutes gives you a very good idea of what's going on. The user decided to use a USB hub as a starting point to power the Raspberry Pi and multiply the USB ports that will later allow connecting gamepad converters, so they can use the console's original controls. The Super Nintendo's main switch controls power to the hub, and by extension, the whole system. The original power supply doesn't have the right specs to power the hub "and" the Raspberry Pi at the same time, which required a bit of extra surgery.
Even so, the most interesting aspect of this modification is the "recycling" of an old cartridge and the original contact socket as an extension for a USB port and the Raspberry Pi's Ethernet port, so if they need to temporarily use the console as a regular computer, they can do it without any trouble. The gallery seems incomplete, but the material is enough to inspire. An old NES, a broken Sega Genesis... everything can come back from the darkness with a Raspberry Pi, a soldering iron, and plenty of determination.
