Building a new Toploader NES in 2023! Opentendo Toploader build guide and demonstration

foreign hey guys welcome back to fix a Friday so this week I am here with an exciting and cool new retro project um so it's about my favorite console which is the Nintendo Entertainment System and as you might expect it is for the top loader so uh some of you may be familiar with a project I did about two years ago where I tried to build a Nintendo entertainment system using as many new parts as possible so it was all thanks to this project that was made by someone who goes by the name of red herring32 and he designed This Modern Recreation of the front loader NES that he refers to as the opentendo it's just this awesome open source project I love it I've built several of them since then um and it's something that if you're an open source Enthusiast and you love these kinds of projects that I recommend you check out so um red herring32 has been at it again and now he has made an open source implementation for the Nintendo top loader and that is what I have right here in this box from pcba and so here it is this is a modern Recreation of the NES top loader and so if you fully populate this it should work just like a standard top loader does including with RF out of course that also means that you could modify this with any srgb or with the NES HDMI kit that's no longer available or pretty much anything else it should behave exactly like a top loader NES so there's all sorts of cool and interesting possibilities that come with this project that being said this is a beta project right now it is not finalized it's almost finalized this is a release candidate so today what I'm going to be doing is building it for the first time and we're gonna see if it works all right let's check it out now this week I wouldn't have been able to get this project done without my friends at pcbway.com ordering the pcbs for the open tender top learner project was really easy and once your Gerber files are uploaded you can quickly review them and make all sorts of changes the pcbs are very high quality and they arrived at my door quickly so I didn't have to wait to get started with this awesome project and you can count on them for all sorts of other services like 3D printing and injection molding as well so if you're creating and developing new electronics projects PCB way has got you covered thanks again for your support and now let's get back to this week's project okay so before I get started I just wanted to lay everything out on my workbench and talk to you a little bit about um how to start a project like this and what I have so as you can see I have an original NES top loader shell and this one actually came from a customer of mine who had this top loader someone had attempted to mod it with the NES RGB and completely destroyed it like the the the motherboard was completely wrecked the NES RGB itself was totally wrecked and so it became completely unsalvageable so I'm really hoping that with this project I can basically rebuild a top loader motherboard and make this thing fully functional again so that's where I have the Shelf from and you'll also notice there are some parts that I harvested from that top loader including the cartridge slot and a whole bunch of smaller components which I'll discuss later this is the back panel which has the power and the RF comes in from here as well we've got our opentendo motherboard which I received from PCB way and over here on the right hand side are all of the brand new components that I have Acquired and I got these using the bill of materials which helpfully provides part numbers and items on digikey and Mauser so that you can very easily pick them up so whenever you work on a project like this it's really helpful to do a couple of things one is to start with the shortest components and then progressively build your way up to the taller and taller components the other thing that's also very helpful is that if um chips can be socketed you should do so because it will make troubleshooting much easier and because this is an untested beta build I'm definitely going to be doing that because I really don't know if this is going to work or not all right so the first thing we're going to do is get all this stuff set aside and I'm going to start with putting in the resistors and then follow up with the ceramic capacitors okay so I'm going to start with the shortest components on the board and that would be the resistors and the ferrite bead and fixed inductors which are located over here and over here respectively so I'm going to show you just with the first resistor how I'm doing this and to make things very easy for myself I'm using the bill of materials and I'm going in numerical order from resistor 1 all the way to resistor 10 and I have a stack of my resistor bags right here going from number one to number 10 and this all helps me to minimize mistakes just as a warning this is a pretty challenging project so I would not recommend this for someone who's a total beginner to soldering um okay so this is how I'm gonna just solder in these you just place them into the Vias right here try to line them up in the center like that and then bend out the leads so that they're making nice contact with the Vias and then at this point I'll go ahead and solder this one into place but when you bend them out like this it really keeps them in place so they're not going to mess around or move around all right so let me go ahead and finish populating the board and solder these guys into position [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] okay so we have all of our short components installed on the board and right now actually if you want to double check your work it's a good time to do so if you have a multimeter like this you can put it into this omega symbol here and if you measure both sides of each component you can verify the value of each of these resistors just to be sure um but yeah I I went over my work and all 10 of these resistors are in the right spot so the next thing we've got to do is install ceramic capacitors that's probably the most numerous component that's on this board I think there's about 20 or so of them that need to be installed so what I'm going to do in this case is go value by value get them on the board bend the leads like I did for the resistors and solder them into place all right let's get that step going foreign [Music] thank you okay so now that the ceramic capacitors are out of the way we're going to start adding on a few components that have to be harvested um and so these particular components these four here are known as diode arrays and so these are needed for controller ports one and two what's interesting about these is that they are on the top loader but they are also present on the front loader as well so my hope is that one day this opentendo project could be used not only to resurrect Broken Top loaders which is what I'm trying to do here but that you could also potentially take some of the guts out of a front loader and then use that to make a top loader from scratch now that would require a bunch of things that don't exist yet like a 3D printed shell and a few other components but really we're really not that far from being able to make that kind of conversion possible so anyway I'm kind of digressing here so let me just go over these components a little bit more so the diode arrays like I said they're used for controller ports one and two they have an orientation so you can see that there's a notch on the Dan 601s that indicates the front of it let's just say and these micro PA diode Rays they have a little dot indicating um the let's just say front orientation of them as well now these are two transistors these were also harvested from the top loader but you can also find these on a front loader and you can see they also have a notch and that indicates um the orientation of them as well now these three components you can buy so this is a resistor array this is the crystal oscillator which gives us the clock and then this is a trimmer capacitor and it also has an orientation so normally it's installed like this so that the flat part is facing the reset switch now going back to the board design here let me just move this out of the way real quick the way that you know how to install these components which have an orientation is you can see on the silk screen that the dots are or The Notches are indicated by this little square here the Via is also a Square via and not circular so for example this resistor array is going to drop in just like that as a as an idea of what you've got to do here um same is true for the the micro Pas those are the diode array two and four the Dan 601s are diode arrays one and two and then here are the two transistors and they go right here and the notch goes where the Square via is right here so I'm going to use some kapton tape to hold these things down from the top and then solder them in from the bottom all right so we'll get to that in a few minutes and then we'll move on to the next step [Music] thank you thank you [Music] okay so all of the diode arrays and other components have been added to the board and you can see that their orientations are all correct so you see The Notches here and you can't really see it on camera but there are dots on all of these components they're all facing towards the bottom here on the screen and then we've got our two transistors with our notches here to the right and finally our trimmer capacitor which has the flat part facing the reset button so all those components are done before I move on to the next step I realized there was one little thing I forgot to mention which is this little row of ceramic capacitors here they all look the same on camera but they're actually different so this one that juts out a little bit is a different value and then there are two others I believe it's c18 which is this guy right here and c24 these are .01 microfarad capacitors which are what most of these other ones are the rest are three thirties so when you're filling out this row just pay really close attention to what value each one is that needs to go in because they're not all the same and you can mess that up okay so with all that being said the next thing that we're going to be doing is installing sockets so all of the chips on this board are facing in the same orientation so you can see they all have a notch and they're facing towards the bottom over here so I have sockets for all of them and I'm going to be doing that again because this is you know a prototype board I don't know what the outcome really is going to be and I have chips that are pulled from a front loader Nintendo these are the same as the ones on the top loader actually there's nothing special or different about them so you can see that they have a notch so this is the CPU the one back over here is the PPU and so you just got to match them up to where they need to go and face the notch in the correct orientation as far as the other chips go most of them are off the shelf with the exception of the static Ram right over here which is the RAM for the video memory and for the CPU so I have um these chips right here these were pulled from a top loader so I'm going to go ahead and use those that being said I believe that you can still buy New Old Stock of these RAM chips so if you don't have a top loader it should still be possible to Source these but certainly right now with the way things are with chips and shortages and all that it's just a lot easier to just get these from a top Builder which is what I did all right so I'm going to get started with getting these sockets in place [Music] foreign [Music] okay so now we're really getting down to the end of the installation and so these are some of the last very large parts that need to be installed and I just kind of wanted to talk about them for a few minutes uh over here we have electrolyte capacitors those are pretty straightforward the negative side of them is indicated by a stripe and these values are pretty standard stuff there's only like five or so caps on the entire board um this component right here I believe is just like a coil um and this is something I had to pull from the board I'm wondering if there are modern replacements for this there probably are but this is a part that I'm really not that knowledgeable about to be quite honest um we have a bridge rectifier and this is a brand new one these also have an orientation so you can see one leg is a little bit longer than the others and so that is the positive leg and so that again has to be installed a very specific way on the board to convert the AC coming in into DC we've got our RF modulator we've got our original Power connector this is something that can be 3D printed so you wouldn't necessarily need this if you didn't have it and then here's our controller port and then lastly we've got our 7805 voltage regulator reset button here and the heatsink so some of these parts are things that you can still buy these days and some of them are not so specifically you know the controller Port power switch reset switch those are things you really can't buy um technically the heatsink as well although you can use a switching regulator instead of a linear one those components don't require heat sinks so if you were building this completely from scratch without a donor top loader you could potentially omit this if you used a switching regulator so I kind of wanted to show all these parts because this project really got me thinking that you know maybe not too far off into the near future you could take a front loader NES Harvest a handful of parts from it and then convert it into a top loader using this board now you would need things that don't quite exist yet like a 3D printed shell or maybe an injection molded shell and then there are Parts like this um there's nothing that you can buy off the shelf that replaces this for the moment um same thing goes for the power switch and reset switch although this does look very similar to the Nintendo 64 one I'm going to look into whether that works but if replacements for these three parts here um can be uh you know someone can come up with that then then you could potentially build a front a top loader out of front loader parts which would be really cool um all right so I'm going to go ahead and start installing these components and I'm going to try to go from the shortest ones to the tallest ones as before and then we're going to go over things before we get to the final part foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay so we are finally here and I just have one more thing to install and I uh decided to put it into the bottom shell of this top loader and yeah it fits perfectly and it looks absolutely gorgeous um during those uh soldering scenes you may have noticed a couple of blue wires here that's because again this is a beta version of the hardware um the final version will have some of these issues fixed that I discovered so the V is unfortunately for the controller ports we're just a little bit too small so I had to drill them out and these badge wires are actually for all of the connections that are present on the top so yeah this isn't something you'll need to do I just had to do it because again this is not the final product yet but yeah otherwise everything else has worked out pretty well and as you can see everything has been populated so the last thing we're going to be doing is installing this which is the cartridge slot this is by far the hardest thing to pull off of the original top loader I just use my desolder gun and hot air station but I think maybe in the future I would consider using chip quick for this because it was really really time consuming and difficult um each one of these pins can be removed from the cartridge slot and in fact when I pulled this thing out a whole bunch of them got left behind um and so you actually have to push them back in and you've got to make sure all of them are still straight and fully aligned and coming up to the top which is what you can see right here hopefully so I wanted to show you guys something else before I continue with the final product um so there are third-party uh famicom and Nintendo cartridge slots like the one you see right here so these are used in like clone consoles like the Retron 5 and I don't know a whole host of cheap Chinese clones you can see that they have a similar kind of footprint but there are some differences one is that the four pins in the center are clipped on the original top uh loader cartridge slot so you would have to do that with this the other big difference is the height so as you can see here I think the width is basically the same but the top loader cartridge slot is ever so slightly taller so if you don't have access to one of these or if yours is destroyed which could happen you can and use this but it's going to be a little too short you may have to modify the top of your top loader shell so that the cartridges can actually get down far enough to make contact with this thing or maybe alternatively this needs to be like elevated ever so slightly maybe like some kind of a spacer or something so that basically you can get up to here yeah that probably would also work um basically like some kind of small spacer that gives it the height that it needs in order to uh to work so yeah this is just something I pulled off of a famicom adapter that I own but it was just to illustrate the point okay so now we're going to go ahead solder this thing in and then give it the first test okay so it's been a little while and as you can see now the top loader is now fully assembled uh so before I go ahead and show it to you in action I wanted to tell you a little bit about what has happened since that first test so I did finish installing the cartridge slot as you can see it looks gorgeous I tried it and as you might expect I got absolutely nothing I plugged in a game and I got a black screen right away um so I started working with red herring 32 and we were troubleshooting and right away he found a problem right over here with q1 this is the transistor that does the video output from the pp you and there was actually a mistake on the PCB so this pin right here was tied to the middle pin and as a result we weren't getting any kind of video whatsoever so um I went and got out my craft knife and I actually physically cut the traces so that these two were separated and going to the correct places and then we tried it and we got glitches lots and lots of beautiful glitches so the glitches pointed to a problem right over here this is the video RAM it might have also pointed to this chip right here which is also tied in to the to the video memory um but it took a little bit longer to find this one but eventually I found that two of the data lines data line four and five were actually tied together they they were bridged and I looked over my soldering my soldering was perfectly fine and so we looked at um or rather red herring 32 looked at the schematic and the the board layout and he realized that the trace between these two was just a little too close and they were accidentally tied together so I came in again with my craft knife and carefully separated the two from each other and once we did that we got a nice beautiful picture so what I'm going to do now is plug this thing in fully assemble it and give you a quick test all right so we've got everything plugged in and I've got my everdrive connected to it so let's go ahead and see how it looks and yeah there it is it boots up and it looks exactly like you would expect for an official NES top loader so I'm just going to move the camera a bit and zoom in so you can take a look at this screen right here so as you can probably tell there are these very noticeable lines here in the gray and that is typical of a top loader they're notorious for having these jail bars in the video so let me go ahead and just pick a game and demonstrate how it works but yeah essentially it works exactly like um you know a real top loader does it can also play European games which is something that a North American top loader can also do and I've also tried using it with um modern chips instead of uh the older chips that I pulled from that top loader so basically that's how it's set up right now the only original chips in there are the CPU and the PPU everything else is a modern chip and it's working perfectly um so yeah overall I would say that this project is a success and I found a whole bunch of issues with this beta version of the board which should be corrected now I've already purchased some new pcbs and so I believe that this project is going to be public very soon and you guys will be able to build them yourselves now I'm sure many of you are thinking okay well what about NES RGB uh can I install that here yes absolutely that is something I will be doing in a follow-up video when I have a finalized version of the board so expect to see that from me pretty soon all right guys so that's it for this week's video If you like this kind of content then consider subscribing to the channel I have videos out like this all the time and of course if you've got consoles that you want repaired or modified you can contact me directly at 1uprestorations.com okay guys thanks very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Long Island Retro Gaming

Views: 32,988

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Id: cUca49PzLd4

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023