Making The World’s Smallest NES With REAL Nintendo Hardware

foreign [Applause] someone has taken an original NES and shrunk it down to the size of a Game Boy and before you scoff and say oh that's just another emulator handheld I'm here to tell you that it's not this project was created by red herring32 and it uses the PPU and CPU from an original NES console but he made those components smaller too by manually shaving them to a super tiny size going from this to this so that it can fit into this handheld form factor this is the tiny tendo and it's pretty incredible [Music] hey everyone how's it going my name is Tito and welcome to another episode of retro renew today I am super excited to share with you a project that I've been following for over a year and that's been in development for over three years this is the tiny tendo a fully functioning Nintendo entertainment system with the same overall footprint of a Nintendo Game Boy what makes this project even remotely possible is the shrinking down of the actual brains of the NES the PPU and CPU or picture processing unit and the central processing unit these two chips are what make an NES a NES now this project comes to us from a well-respected member of the modding Community by the name of red herring32 by day he works on his farm doing metal and Woodwork and by night he Tinkers with electronics working on some pretty amazing projects red herring 32 is a self-taught electrical engineer getting his start by learning how to solder mods to his original Xbox and from there things spiraled out of control with time his projects became more ambitious one of which you may be familiar with the open tendo which is an Open Source Hardware reverse engineering and Recreation of the original 1985 front loading NES motherboard and it was that project that laid the foundation for the tiny tendo from day one tiny tendo was always an intended extension of the open tendo project and it leverages heavily from the Project's findings through his work on opentendo red herring 32 gained intimate knowledge of the NES Hardware enabling him to shrink down the NES motherboard to its Essentials and make it into this small little handheld device that you see right here believe it or not the small motherboard of the tiny tendo does everything the full-size original version is capable of red herring 32 poured three years of development and thousands of hours into making the NES into a portable handheld now you may have recently watched the gaming historian's coverage of the BDL Express which was a similar concept to the tiny tendo in that it was a portable NES in that video it was touted that the BDL Express was able to get the NES motherboard trunking down from a 6x9 footprint to a roughly three by five inch one while this was an incredible feat in and of itself back in 1990 red herring 32 trounced this by making his fully featured tiny tendo motherboard a mere two by two and a half inches heck the tiny tender motherboard is smaller than the original game boy dmgs talk about small okay we get it this thing is Tiny But what enables this device to be this small has to do specifically with the PPU and the CPU now looking at these chips they're rather large they need to be smaller to fit into the overall smaller package of the Game Boy shell red herring 32 was able to modify these chips so that they're roughly one square centimeter smaller than the tip of your finger but we'll get into that a little bit more later on in the video the tiny tendo is truly a project of passion and love for not only the NES but handheld consoles as well red herring 32 as a kid dreamed of being able to take the Home console experience of the NES on the go and with the tiny tendo I think he accomplished that goal alright so in this video I'm going to go over all the parts of the tiny tendo that makes this project possible then I'll do a brief assembly to show you how it all comes together I'll go over all of its features review the pros and cons discuss the future of the project and of course provide you with my overall thoughts so red herring 32 actually sent the tiny tender to the channel in a really cool custom box that almost looks like a retail product and funny enough if you scan the spark code using the Amazon App you get a little Easter egg some boneless Herring snacks anyway opening up the box and removing its contents you see that there are quite a few parts so let's go over each of them individually I first want to talk about the motherboard it's easily the most interesting part of the tiny tendo and really what makes this project possible now like before if we take a look at an unmodified PPU and CPU you'll notice that they are huge chips so red herring spent about five months trying to figure out how to make these smaller a friend of his jokingly suggested to just Dremel them and red herring actually ended up taking that approach to heart after many failed attempts he finally had a breakthrough and was able to get the two chips down to a much smaller footprint and the key to everything was a discovery that the bottom of the two chips could be sanded down exposing all the leads as well as the die itself and still be fully functional this allowed him to surface mount these chips to the motherboard and keep the overall size of the board much smaller speaking of the tiny tender motherboard it's essentially a fully functioning NES motherboard it pretty much has a complete feature set of mono audio mixing as well as controller and cartridge inputs all the parts on the board are brand new and readily available components of course with the exception of the PPU and CPU and like I mentioned previously it's smaller than a DMG motherboard which is simply incredible now the next part I want to discuss is the power management board it handles charging of the two 18650 Lithium-ion batteries via USBC and allows for charging while playing it handles all the voltage regulation for the entire handheld and holds both the power and reset buttons this here is the LCD driver board it's a commercial off-the-shelf part that requires some modification the first mod adds brightness control with this little board that was actually developed for red herring 32 by uveltal Griffin it uses an acne chip with custom code written by uveltal as well another thing that needs to be done to the LCD driver board is that it must be modded to run off of 5 volts instead of the 7 to 12 volts it previously required this is done simply by removing a diode and adding a wire and lastly we need to add this custom video amplifier to boost the composite signal from the tiny tendo so that it's usable by the LCD assembly this is accomplished by this L-shaped custom board this next part here is the button PCB this contains the same exact circuitry as an original NES controller to design this board red herring leveraged his work from another one of his projects the picopad which is a hilariously small fully functioning NES controller now of course no handheld is complete without audio so red herring designed his own custom audio board which uses a Mono Amplifier chip to boost the output audio of the tiny tendo it also incorporates a switching headphone jack which disables the speaker when headphones are plugged in and the last item is the cartridge slot PCB this uses a new off-the-shelf 80-pin connector because the NES only uses 72 pins the additional 8 are used to Triple up the power pins this connector allows the pin out of newly designed cartridges to be identical to that of The Originals and speaking of the cartridges since the tiny tendo is small well the cartridges need to be small also this is where another familiar model comes into the picture bucket mouse if you're an avid viewer of the channel then that name Probably sounds familiar I recently covered the DMG color which was a very cool project created by bucket mouse and before he embarked on the DMG color project he worked extensively on reverse engineering and improving Retro Game cartridges such as the Super Nintendo Sega Genesis and of course the NES so red herring 32 reached out to bucket mouse to see if he'd be interested in helping design tiny tendo NES cartridge is he rose to the occasion and certainly delivered he designed several board types to Showcase what is possible with tiny tendo these carts are built to be the same size as the ones for Game Boy and as you can see significantly smaller than their NES counterparts honestly the design of these tiny tendo carts are just so much fun and these labels are just icing on the cake here you can see an unpopulated smb2 PCB that bucket mouse designed for games like Super Mario Bros 2. quite the difference in size anyway these smaller carts allow the tiny tender to work and just goes to show how much effort went into this project oh and I almost forgot to mention the outer shell of the tiny tendo it boasts nearly identical measurements to the DMG it honestly looks pretty great red herring even printed them out in this red and off-white color that almost resembles the original famicom anyway those are the primary parts of the tiny tendo now let me give you a quick overview of how they all come together okay so the first thing I want to mention is that this is really only a partial build video all the boards I'm using were pre-assembled by red herring 32 including the motherboard which already has the trimmed PPU and CPU installed this will just give you an idea of how the tiny tendo is put together so we're going to start by populating the front Shell by dropping in the LCD panel [Music] this is followed by the LCD retaining bracket [Music] next we're going to connect the driver board to the LCD ribbon cable [Music] foreign [Music] the volume thumb wheel goes in next these are secured with two screws and I have to say that the fitment is a bit tight the bracket seems to bend just a little bit to hold them in then on the other side we're going to do the same thing with the LCD brightness thumb wheel [Music] now we're going to go ahead and drop in all the buttons and membranes as well as the speaker [Music] then we're going to drop in the audio board we want to install this before the button board otherwise we may run into some fitment issues [Music] now we can install the button board I really like how red herring made this whole build very modular everything goes in very nicely [Music] before proceeding let's give all the buttons a quick test to make sure that they feel okay now we're going to start to assemble the rear shell the first thing we're going to install is the cartridge slot PCB then go ahead and insert the flex ribbon as shown with the other end connecting to the motherboard it may be helpful to put a crease in the ribbon if it's stiff like the one that I have and after the ribbon is secured fasten the motherboard to the Shell using the four M2 screws [Music] next we're going to want to place the reset button into its opening prior to installing the power management board behind it and once it's in we can slide in the power board as shown be sure to install it under the two LED light pipes [Music] give the power and reset button a quick test to ensure that they're able to actuate properly optional but I placed a piece of thick card between the two LED light pipes to reduce any light bleed between the two now comes the fun part we're going to wire the two halves together I'm going to start off by first connecting the positive and negative battery terminals to the power board [Music] thank you [Music] proceed by wiring up all the button controls for reference be sure to follow the wiring diagram on red herring 32's GitHub as that will have the latest wiring diagram since some updates were made to some of these boards since the making of this video now connect the controller wires to the motherboard [Music] next up is the audio board red herring supplied this spiraled wire for the audio and ground the spiraled wire helps insulate the sound and reduce noise in the signal we'll also be using the same type of wire for the audio connection and since it is hard to distinguish which wire is which since they're both a copper color I recommend using a multimeter to ensure that you're making the correct connections and here you can see we use the same wire to connect the LCD driver board to the motherboard now we're going to hook up the audio board to the volume wheel again be sure to follow red herring's latest wiring diagram I'll have it linked in the video description [Music] and don't forget to connect the VCC pad on the button board to the VCC on the audio board [Music] next we're going to need to connect the power management board to the motherboard I'm using old leftover resistor legs for this to make it easier but you can also use wire if you'd like now we need to send power to the LCD through this 3.3 volt connection on the motherboard and then we need to hook up the custom LCD brightness controller board to the other thumb wheel [Music] and this pad here connects to pin 1 on our composite amplifier board [Music] lastly we'll need to connect the VCC and ground of the composite amp to their corresponding points on the motherboard awesome with all the soldering done let's drop in our 18650 Lithium-ion batteries and test everything out now you want to absolutely make sure that the polarity is correct when installing these otherwise you risk frying the system great now insert a game and power the unit on wow that is absolutely incredible I can't believe this works this is so cool okay all that's left to do is to button up the tiny tendo and we're done I have to say that the tiny tendo is an amazing project the sheer amount of work that went into its design ranging from the outer shell the pcbs that needed to be designed as well as the work to shrink down the PPU and CPU it was an enormous undertaking and red herring 32 really pulled it off the build itself actually went rather smoothly but I do have to confess that all the boards I used were pre-assembled and to actually build everything from scratch would have been far more difficult especially the trimming of the PPU and the CPU now you may have noticed that the rear shell color has changed I actually had to print a new one since several of the screw posts for the cartridge PCB broke off after assembly red herring had actually been redesigning the shell to reinforce the cartridge Port area and he sent me the updated version and it works quite a bit better anyway let's do a quick rundown of all the key features of the tiny tendo the first and most obvious feature is its form factor it looks and feels like a DMG overall it's very comfortable to hold and those with larger hands would probably appreciate the added thickness it features both brightness and volume controls via the thumb wheels on either side of the system and works exactly as you'd expect around top you'll notice the prominent USBC Port which is used to charge the two internal 18650 Lithium-ion batteries the unit allows charging while playing which is a very convenient feature and right next to the usb-c port are two indicator LEDs the green one indicates that the unit is power on while the other tells you the charge status when plugged in on the bottom of the unit is the headphone jack that automatically switches off the speaker when headphones are plugged in and right above that is the speaker which gets plenty loud front and center is the large 3-inch display which looks fantastic although I do wish it was a bit brighter so when it comes to Features it has everything you'd expect from a handheld it's nothing crazy except for the fact that we can now play NES games on the go on authentic Nintendo Hardware which is Simply Amazing okay so now that you got a tour of the device let's go over the pros and cons starting with the pros I have to say that this is an absolutely incredible project the amount of engineering and New Concepts that had to be developed in order to make this project happen is no small feed not only that red herring 32 pulled this project off with such polished results and the contributions to the project from the likes of bucket mouse and yuveltal showcase why the Retro modding Community is just so amazing Teamwork Makes the Dream Work the games look fantastic and the whole system works as one would expect the culmination of years of work which definitely shows the passion he has for the NES all right those are the pros but now let's get into the cons first I'm not going to sugarcoat it this mod is difficult on top of having to assemble from scratch each of the various boards required for the build the single most difficult part has to be the trimming of the PPU and CPU that task right there has no guarantee of success and you really need to know what you're doing or you risk needlessly sacrificing NES chips red herring has made a very detailed trimming guide on his GitHub for those that want to try this but still that part of the build Remains the most daunting the only other con in my opinion is the shell during my build I had several screw posts break on me but that could have been down to the material used or the settings of the 3D printer I discussed some of the shell issues with red herring and he already updated the design to make the posts more robust and the cart PCB to be more secure since that is obviously an area that exhibits a lot of external forces due to the repeated inserting and removal of game cards now one of the things that red herring asked me to mention in this video is that he's not going to be selling these as kits or fully built systems so please don't reach out to him asking him to build you one the project is completely open source and all the documentation files and instructions are available on his GitHub if you want to build one on your own regardless I would definitely check him out on Twitter where he posts all the latest news on his work and projects so definitely give him a follow anyway the last thing I want to touch upon is the future of the tiny tendo project now when I asked red herring about this his response got me really excited as you know because a tiny tendo uses real NES Hardware it is theoretically compatible with all games with the exception of light gun games while they would run on the tiny tendo you wouldn't have a way of playing them since you can't plug the light gun in and even if you could it won't work because those require ACR team monitor so the way red herring is planning on implementing this functionality is by integrating a touch screen if you can pull that off that would be amazing additionally he's thinking of adding a turbo button feature as well as making the tiny tendo even tinier so that it would fit into a Game Boy Color or even a Game Boy Pocket form factor so the future of the tiny tendo looks bright and I'm excited to see where red herring 32 takes it so there you have it the tiny tendo project from red herring 32 an incredible undertaking with Incredible results now if you enjoyed this video I really think you'll like this one here so check it out and as always thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you again next Thursday [Music]

Channel: Macho Nacho Productions

Views: 133,642

Keywords: macho nacho productions, macho nacho, macho nacho tito, tito macho nacho, redherring32, tinytendo review, tinytendo red herring, tinytendo nes, smallest nes, portable nes console, portable nes player, tinytendo redherring, macho nacho tinytendo, tiny tendo

Id: eQB3PkR-TdY

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023