Building a new NES in 2021: Introducing the NESessity DIY NES board!

hey guys welcome back to the channel so this week i'm going to be talking about an original nintendo entertainment system that i picked up at a flea market for five bucks and i've picked it up for so cheap for a variety of reasons one was that as you can see it's super yellow and it was kind of filthy when i got it the other reason is that it doesn't work and so i thought all right let me see what's wrong with this thing maybe i can fix it up quick it turns out though that it was not a trivial kind of repair um this thing had definitely been submerged in water at some point and so the entire top half of the board was pretty rusted out and there were a lot of traces that had been destroyed or corroded away technically this is something that can be fixed but it's a pretty decent amount of work and the way things are going right now i just don't have the kind of time to do extensive trace repair so i thought all right maybe i can use this for another diy nintendo project so not too long after finding that nintendo i was contacted by somebody who goes by the name of low budget so for those of you who don't know low budget has a page on tindy.com and he's a really talented engineer that makes all sorts of amazing stuff including the parsec super gun but what we have here today is one of his creations which is called the necessity so what the necessity is is a modern replacement for the original nes front loader motherboard so this allows you to build an original nes with completely new parts uh with the exception of two parts that um that you can source and so uh there's the cpu and the ppu and these are the two chips that i pulled from that wrecked uh nintendo motherboard so aside from these two chips we're going to make a nintendo using completely all new parts now this sounds very similar to the open tendo project that i did a few weeks ago but what makes this different is that it has a whole bunch of extra features that a standard front loader doesn't have and that's something that we're going to discuss in more detail after i build this thing so let's get started and open up all the packaging and see what we can do to build a new nintendo from scratch all right so i'm just about to get started and what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with all of the low profile components first and so that means that i'm going to be using the resistors and and the diodes and there's also two surface mount chips um that we're going to be installing as well so one thing that's really nice about this kit is that you can purchase either the bare pcb or you can get all of the parts which is what i have here that makes things very easy so with the open tendo you know i had to go and buy all the parts myself and some of them are a little bit difficult to source because they're no longer being produced you have to get new old stock from a variety of places with the necessity everything is is completely modern and available so so you can either use the bill of materials and buy it all yourself or like you can do what happened here in my case which is just to get everything in one kit and that makes things i think a little bit easier in terms of getting it all assembled so let's get started with all of these small parts and we'll go from there [Music] all right so all of the low profile components have now been added to the board and the only thing i wanted to do is just briefly mention that a few of these have a specific orientation so that would be the surface mount chips so with u11 there's actually a stripe indicating that that's the only quote unquote front of the the chip and if you take a look uh right over here on the board there's a little dot and this indicates that this is where the front of the chip is so that's how you can tell the same is true over here there's a little dot on u10 and it's on the upper left side of it and so you want to make sure that dot on the chip matches the dot on the board the only other thing to mention here are the diodes that i installed so on the main board there's a small zener diode that's right over here and it has a stripe and so you just have to make sure that the stripe on the diode matches the stripe on the board and then on the power board there's a whole bunch of diodes so this is the bridge rectifier for the power board and so all four of these are the same they're all linked together in the kit and you can see that the stripes are in specific orientations and then there's a second diode or a final diode rather right over here on this side here and that's about it okay so that takes care of the diodes and the resistors and the surface mount parts so now the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to take care of the ceramic capacitors which there's quite a lot of and so that's going to be a bulk of what we're going to be doing next [Music] so all right so now i'd say we're about halfway through the process and all of the really small components are on the board successfully so the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to start putting on some of these larger components um and basically finish off the the power board completely so most of these are fairly straightforward there's going to be a few that have an orientation to them um but i'll just go over that once i uh once i get to them okay let's get on with the next step [Music] do [Music] okay so we're getting to the home stretch and so i just wanted to cover some of the components that i just installed so some of these do have an orientation obviously one of that would one of those would be the electrolytic capacitors they all have a positive and negative side and that's very clearly marked on the board so that makes your life rather easy another component that has a specific orientation are these resistor networks so they have a dot indicating um that the dot has to go on the on the left hand side um as you can see over here and that's actually marked on the board there's like a little notch on the on the silk screen of the board and if you look at the resistor networks the dot is here on the left-hand side and that tells you exactly how to set that up one thing that i screwed up on is um this this little 15-pin connector here there are supports that go on the left and right side and when i first soldered this in i actually forgot those so i actually had to desolder this pop those in and then put it back in so if you're doing this just don't forget those supports that's really important um aside from that there's oh yeah there's just one other thing too there's two transistors um the bill of materials tells you which one goes in which position and then you'll notice that the the transistors have like a flat side and a rounded side and that also matches the silk screen on the board so there's a flat side here so the flat side goes on the right and here the flat side goes on the left so that's about it and so at this point the only thing we have left to install are the chips so i'm going to go ahead and do that now and then of course we still have to finish off this power board so i'm going to take care of that as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right so there's one more little adjustment that i need to make and this is the original power and reset pcb so this just has the led the power and the reset so in order to get the light to work properly the instructions indicate that you actually have to desolder the led and you have to flip it around and so i don't know if this is coming up on camera but you can see that one side has like a little notch to it so normally that notch is here on the right hand side so i already took it out and i flipped it so that the notch is on the left hand side now we're just going to solder this into place and we should be all set okay so after a really long and crazy soldering marathon i can finally say that this thing is finished um whether it works or not is anybody's guess but i think we'll find that out in a few minutes but before i do that i wanted to just kind of show you some of the features that are available on the necessity that really make it stand out from a standard front loader nintendo one is these three potentiometers right here so these are used to dial in the exact volume that you want for each of the different sound channels so as some of you might know the standard nes has two uh pins on the cpu that are used for the sound channels you have four waves uh four voices rather and so you can dial those in with these pots but then you also have this third one here and then that's used for expansion audio so japanese games could take advantage of extra sound channels also known as expansion audio that's not something that's normally present on a north american nintendo but not only is that present here you can also dial it in to exactly the right volume that you want so aside from that you also have a few other cool things so you have um functionality for a lot of famicom peripherals that's what this 15 pin port here is is for so this is available on the bottom of the shell and so you can plug in famicom peripherals and they will work with this uh with this front loader and that's not not something you can do with a standard front loader or at least not easily there's also a microphone so even famicom microphone support is available here so if you ever wanted to play the japanese version of legend of zelda on a front loader and you know shout at the at the system and and uh get some kind of result you can do that with this with this necessity board so i think that's really neat um what else can i mention it's definitely very much built for adding in other types of mods so there is the very well-known nes rgb mod which i definitely plan to install in this but i'm going to do that as part of a separate video so they do provide a daughter board specifically for that purpose and it makes it very easy to install you can also install this with the high def nes but it's very important for everyone to know that has been sold out for a very long time it's probably never going to come back in stock so i'm not even going to really waste my time thinking about it i'm planning on adding rgb to this and uh yeah one other really cool thing and this is something i really wanted for the open tendo but didn't have is that the power supply is also um you know completely new and modern so you can see it has this absolutely massive heatsink for the 7805 voltage regulator i had to kind of be creative i didn't have the right kind of screw and nut to to lock it into place but i did have the standoff and this screw which was compatible so i used that um and so you can see that the sound instead of being mono would split into stereo sound with the left and right channels over here and then your composite video is out over here this is an unused switch but potentially you could use this i believe for um for changing palettes and the power jack is here this is like your standard nintendo power supply will work but you could also use a dc power supply as well okay so that's a review of the entire board i think it has some really cool and unique features to offer so let's go ahead and plug this thing in and see if it works okay so the moment of truth has arrived and we're ready to finally test this thing out so what i've done over here just to finish this thing off is i installed a blinking light wind and this is a modern replacement for the old 72 pin connector and tray that used to be in a normal nintendo i wanted to use this just because i wanted to make this as new as possible because it you know at this point really the only original parts of the cpu and the ppu so these are nice because they don't wear out which is a big problem with 72 pin connectors so for its inaugural voyage we're going to start with good old super mario brothers duck hunt let's see if it works oh man beautiful okay oh it's loud [Music] all right well looks like it works that's really exciting all right so i'm gonna go ahead and just kind of put it through its paces a little bit and i'll be back in a second to go over some of the really cool features that the necessity has okay so right now i am using my everdrive n8 pro and i'm using it to play a japanese game called gimmick which is probably one of the greatest nes games of all time but aside from that as you can hear the music is so good and the reason why it's so good is that it uses the four channels that the cpu has but it also adds an extra two channels of audio and so that's what we're hearing so i have this playing because i want to show you that with the necessity you can really dial in the sound to exactly the levels that you want so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just lift this up a little bit so you guys can see the potentiometers and i'm going to start messing with them two of them are for the cpu and then the third one is for the expansion audio so you can hear now there's some voices that are just gone i made them quiet [Music] and let me just try another track really quick and see if i got it back to where it's supposed to be maybe it's a little too loud now yeah that seems pretty balanced so that's one of the really cool things about this particular board and it's an issue that people have with expansion audio trying to get those levels dialed in just right can be challenging and this particular board really overcomes those challenges so let me just show you a few other really cool things about it let me just all right there we go so let me see if i can just pull this over to yeah show you the underside of the necessity and so what's really nice is that you do have this 15 pin connector and it's available on the other side so there's a bunch of famicom accessories that use this and so you know with this board you have access to that you can totally use all of those famicom accessories on a north american front loader style system it's kind of out of camera but underneath here there is also a microphone so if you're playing the japanese version of legend of zelda for example you can kill certain enemies by shouting into the microphone so with this mod with this board you can actually scream at your nintendo and and kill enemies with that mic and there's also a little potentiometer over here to adjust the sensitivity of that microphone so again like these little features make this board really nice and in addition to that you know the fact that you can just buy it in a very easy kit form and you don't have to go sourcing parts i really like that as well and um it's a completely new board so so as you recall when i did the opentendo i still had to use the original rf modulator i think i've developed a solution so i don't have to do that anymore and i'll be making a video about that in the future but at least with the necessity right out of the box you can have a completely all new nintendo and build it completely from bottom to top all right guys so that's it for this video um you know if you like this kind of content i i have videos out every week and it would be great if you could you know either like the video or considering subscribe you know subscribing to the channel uh if you guys have consoles that need to be repaired or modified you can also reach me directly at oneuprestorations.com and i can probably help you out alright guys so thanks again for your support and for watching and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Long Island Retro Gaming

Views: 300,637

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Id: vJpRDZzZHs0

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021