A friend of mine told her partner that she had never had a Super Nintendo console. Her birthday was coming up so naturally we started scheming to remedy this lack of retro gaming experience! 🙂

I thought about simply getting a SNES and some games, but that would be boring and waste a bunch of space (cartridges pile up after a while) so I looked at different options, like the Everdrive; which can play games from an SD-card on an original SNES.
But it was pricey, kinda slow, couldn’t run games with enhancement chips (Like Star Fox/Starwings SuperFX chip) and almost as rare as hens teeth.

So I kept thinking about it and finally settled on getting an SNES, taking out the innards and putting a Raspberry PI inside. This actually turned out to be cheaper than the Everdrive. So here’s how I did it. 🙂

At first I got all of these components:
* Super Nintendo console
* Raspberry PI 2
* microSD-card
* USB and HDMI cables for panel mounting (for wiring inside the case and having connectors on the back of the case)
* Power circuit
* SNES controller to USB adapter
* 4,5mm gamebit (for the special screws in the case)
* Piece of plastic to attach the cable connectors

The first thing I did was take out all the internals of the SNES (don’t worry, I kept them so I can revert the changes at a later date if I need to. 🙂 ) and then I started looking at the rear to figure out how to wire the connectors. It turns out that it’s kinda cramped so I had to make some sacrifices. The connectors I had to have were the USB-B (for power) and HDMI. I would have preferred to have an ethernet port and at least one USB port for peripherals, but there simply wasn’t room and I didn’t want to cut open the case too much.

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Yes, my Dremel skills aren’t top-notch. 🙂

After that I took out the controller connector assembly and desoldered the circuit board from the back of the connectors. I’m not sure if this was really necessary but I didn’t want to damage anything if I was going to restore the console at some point.
I then removed the case and connectors from the USB adapter thingy, soldered wires between the circuit board and the connector pins and hot-glued the board firmly in place. This way you can still use original SNES controllers without having to worry.

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In order to keep the whole thing as authentic as possible I decided to get a small circuit board to handle the power switch in the case. The Raspberry PI doesn’t like being turned off cold turkey, you should “halt” the system before cutting the power, and this little board does just that. I wired the normal ON/OFF switch to the circuit board, ran a cable from it to the RPIs GPIO connector and installed a small program. This way the console can be turned on by using the switch, and when the switch is turned off the circuit board first sends a “halt” command to the RPI and when the system is halted the power is cut completely, eliminating the risk of corrupting the SD-card.

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The final touch was adding a light emitting diode (LED) in place of the original one. I ripped out a few from an old PC case and added a yellow one to the case, even though it looks like red when its on. I simply attached it to +3,3v and ground on the GPIO connector which makes it light up when the system is on.
It looks kinda chaotic inside the case with all the cables, but this is the best I was going to get without special-ordering cables with perfect lengths. 🙂

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The software I put on the RPI to make the magic happen is called RetroPie and comes with an array of different emulators pre-packaged. I decided to go with games for the Nintendo Entertainment Systen, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive and the 32X Mega Drive expansion in order to keep it simple and not be required to get different controllers and keyboards and stuff. And it turned out great. 🙂

Below is a video showing the system in action, with the delayed shutdown as well. It takes about 40-45 seconds or so for the Raspberry to boot up completely so I edited together some clips from old games with a chip tune you could watch while waiting. When its done booting up you can play what you want with your original SNES controller and switch games with a moments notice.

http://youtu.be/yez_t6Z3yTA