Crystal Clear NES: Finishing my Opentendo project with a transparent NES shell!

hey guys welcome back to fix it Friday so this week we're going to have a pretty simple project but it's something I wanted to film because it's the culmination of a project that I started almost two years ago so about two years ago or so I built this this is an open tendo which is a open source Recreation of the Nintendo Entertainment System it was made by red herring32 and it's a really fun project because you can build an NES from scratch and it was one of the first times I had done this it was a lot of fun um and uh yeah I I use this thing all the time it's one of my favorite consoles the the only downside is that I have it in this kind of you know yellowed not so great looking Nesh shell and I just did this because I really didn't have any other options but since I built this thing what I've really wanted for it is to have a clear shell so that you can see the you know handmade motherboard on the inside and just give it like that kind of cool custom aesthetic so about a year or so ago I learned about a project from a company called retro gamer store which is a completely all new NES shell made from clear plastic and so that was exactly what I was looking for so I jumped on this thing and I bought two of them and now one year later the uh the the shell has finally shipped and so what I'm going to be doing today is taking uh this open tendo out I'll show you guys what I did uh so that you can see all the cool features that this thing has and then we're going to install it in this clear shell and take a look at how it performs all right so let's get to it all right so let's go ahead and unbox this thing I I went ahead and cut open the top but I actually have not touched it since then um so let's go ahead and see what all the fuss is about now this is really nice so we've got some screws and of course here is the big reveal which is the transparent shell oh man oh I see it's completely two separate parts that is wow that's just beautiful look at that I really never knew if this thing was gonna get uh made and it was kind of perfect timing that this thing was built right when I needed one but yeah that is just gorgeous it is totally clear so it's going to be very easy to see the NES on the inside once I finish building this thing all right so the first thing I'm going to do is as you guys can see there's there's no logo on here and that's something that I kind of would like to remedy and so what I ended up doing was buying this little metal sticker from a company called Luke parts and I'm gonna have a link for this in the description if you guys want to do this yourself it's basically a really nice metal sticker and it allows me to have the Nintendo Entertainment System logo on here um because for probably obvious reasons they they can't ship it with that so I'm going to go ahead and carefully affix this and so so it has like two layers of plastic on it like the adhesive layers back here so I'm gonna have to peel this back line it up position it and then peel back the clear plastic to get this thing all set up all right so let me go ahead and get that going foreign [Music] I have to say it looks really nice um although it's kind of hard to see this on camera so hopefully you guys are seeing it it just makes the console look a lot more I don't know legit with the Nintendo logo on these can be tough to put on you have to make sure you have everything level and lined up I did the best I could by eye I'm sure it's not 100 perfect but it's good enough for me to be happy with all right so before I go ahead and continue I just wanted to give you a quick um look at my opentendo motherboard right here so this is something that I built on the channel quite a long time ago and I'll have a link in the description for what I did to build it but effectively it's a modern Recreation of the original Nintendo Entertainment System and so as you can see it has sockets placed on most of the chips and I also have an NES RGB installed and so this gives me the best possible video from my Nintendo and uh I also instead of using an official RF modulator I removed that and replaced it with this relatively new one that was built by Merlin Shaw so what's really nice about this RF modulator replacement is that you can route all of the RGB signals to it and it uses a Genesis 2 nine pin minidin so what's really great about this connector is that you don't have to cut the shell it fits right in where the RF modulator used to be and you get composite video you get RGB all from one connector and you can use either RGB cables or you can use HD retrovision cables with this particular board it also has this three position uh switch right here and this lets you toggle between between the three different palettes that this particular version of the NES RGB has um this isn't really necessary nowadays because the modern NES RGB um uses button combinations to switch pallets but I have an older version here so this is definitely appreciated for me and then you also get composite video and mono sound out of the side over here so it's um definitely something worth considering if you're doing an NES RGB mod because it makes for a very clean installation as you can see it's all contained on the board itself there's no cutting of the shell and if I want to transfer it like I'm doing right now you literally just screw it into the new con into the new shell and you're good to go um so yeah that's kind of just a general overview of how the console is set up I guess the one thing to mention really quickly is that if you happen to use this uh Power Board you do have to wire up RGB a little bit differently so you can see these three wires right here this is RGB red green and blue so normally if you're not using a Genesis connector you would wire up RGB right here and then you could send that out to an eight pin minidin or you could send it out to a Super Nintendo multi-out that's very common um but if you're using a Genesis either skart cable or HD retrovision cable there are additional components in that cable to process the RGB signal and so if you go from here where there's 75 ohm terminated RGB you actually end up adding extra components and darkening the image and you really don't want to do that so you really have to kind of tap into the quote-unquote raw RGB and thankfully you can do that very easily on the nas RGB right here so there's the three Vias right here next to the RGB encoder chip and so if you just solder in in your red green and blue right here like how you've seen me do it then you can use a Genesis 2 connector and the color levels are correct it's not too dark and yeah you just have the advantages of using this board which is that there's no cutting and you can use component and you can use RGB all right so so yeah that's my long-winded overview of uh of this motherboard right here so let me go ahead and start installing it into its final home [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you all right so everything is fully assembled and I've got to say this thing looks absolutely gorgeous I am really happy with the final results um so yeah I didn't really have any trouble assembling it um the only thing that kind of sucked was that the tiny screws up here they're not standard um from the original Nintendo and they're kind of annoying to deal with you really need like a flat head screwdriver to deal with them so if you're buying one of these and building it for yourself I would recommend leaving those uh original Nintendo screws off and just using regular Phillips screws that you could pull off of like say a Game Boy or something like that that's just way nicer than the original screws that were in a Nintendo console um but yeah apart from that one annoyance it looks really great I mean when you're looking at it from the top you can see what game is inserted and you can see the motherboard and the power PCB and then here on the bottom it's really nice too because they copied the original design so the original shell has a textured bottom just like this except for these areas here but this is where the labels go I'm debating whether I want to take the labels off of that shell and put them onto here let me know what you guys think for now I'm probably going to leave it alone but um I may consider swapping those labels onto here um and then this is where the rubber feet go I'm going to find some Replacements to put on here just so that this doesn't slide as easily as it currently does um but yeah from down here you can see the nesrgb and you can see all the components of the open tendo and what's really cool is you can see the bottom of the power module and you can actually see the Long Island retro gaming logo here because I did help Merlin a little bit with troubleshooting and testing this board and as a as a token of thanks he added uh my logo down to the bottom here which I really appreciate so um yeah that's that's it let me just flip it around onto the back and so you can see here here's the Genesis 2 connector and so you know an RGB cable or an HD retrovision component video cable will fit right in here and you can get RGB from that and here's our palette switch and that works perfectly and then here's our power brick um or our port for the power brick right here so this will work with an official AC adapter from an NES or you could take a DC power supply and use it here as well you guys might notice here in the corner there is a little square or I'm sorry rectangular cutout this is here for using um the SNES multi-out that's super popular with NES RGB installations so you can literally just cut this out and then squeeze it into place right here um I ended up not doing that because again I really like having this clean no cut look um but still it's really convenient that this is here it makes that installation much easier as well so so yeah that's it in a nutshell let's go ahead and plug this thing in and I can show you how it looks okay so I've got it all plugged in and I mean I fully expect it to work because I've been playing on this thing on and off for the last two years now but this is going to be its inaugural power on in its final shell so I figured I'd film that uh together with you guys so yeah one thing I forgot to mention too is that I also have these um so I um I discovered uh that the website retro modding um has transparent NES shells and I think they also have a couple of different colors too but once I saw this I had to grab them uh just because you know it's a perfect match with the console I mean one thing I have to say is that the build quality of these is not quite as nice I mean the plastic feels good but it's um it's frosted over it's not uh clear like I was kind of hoping it would be but you know it's still pretty cool and it is a pretty good match for the console itself which is right over there all right so I've got it all plugged in let's give it 8 test oh that's just gorgeous all right so yeah you can see that um everything is working fine the RGB looks super crisp um I'm gonna go ahead and just pick a game real quick uh sure let's do hmm yeah I guess I'll just do standard Super Mario Brothers because that's just what everyone knows what it's going to look like so let me go ahead and just switch the palette for you you can see there's the switch back here so if I if I just toggle that ah there we go so that's one position this is the default and here's the the third one personally I always leave it like this because I want the sky and Super Mario Brothers to look blue and um this color palette to me just looks really accurate so so yeah it's working perfectly and I finally have you know the most modern new NES that I could possibly build from scratch and I have to say a huge thank you to rgr Dev for for developing this thing and making it uh you know commercially available so that anyone can get it I'll have a link in the description for all the various parts I used to build this thing and of course if you guys have any consoles that you want repaired or modified or if you want me to build you one of these I'd be more than happy to do it you can reach me at oneuprestorations.com all right thanks so much for watching guys and I will see you next time bye [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Long Island Retro Gaming

Views: 12,482

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Id: fwpqCrLHM8o

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023