I suppose I’d do best to kick this blog off with a decent post. Well then, four years ago I got it in my head that I wanted to start working on a portable N64. After having seen the one Ben Heck made it seemed like all too possible. Upon researching I came across the Ben Heck forums, but most importantly, ModRetro found some valuable information, and set off on doing this thing. The basic list of parts I sourced included (though I’m of course going to leave out some things I’ve forgotten):
PsOne Screen (I actually ended up with four or five of these, as well as some donor screens that ended up not working)
- A bunch of n64 boards
- A few TI PTH08080W power regulators
- Various jacks and switches
- SuperPad N64 controller
- Canon Camera Batteries
I specifically chose the SuperPad due to it supporting third party joysticks. With this pad I wouldn’t have to use the abysmal n64 joystick.
Initially when I started off I had begun relocating the cartridge slot, which looked a bit like this:
Yes, this is an old and blurry picture. My bad, it’s four years old. As you can see at some point I had also figured out the pinout and managed to wire the screen directly to the n64 for both power and video (and sound!).
Shortly after this, I realized this thing is wayyyy too big. I’ve come across tutorials for chopping down the boards and all of that fun stuff, but it was a bit out of my expertise, so I ended up sending the board off and having it cut down. It came back looking like this:
While I’d like to say I kept going and finished this thing up, I sort of stopped after getting the chopped board back, and forgot about the n64 for quite some time. I recently rediscovered it a few weeks ago and decided, “Hey, I should finish this thing!” And in comes this blog post. I’ll continue in other posts. I’d throw the current progress in this too, but I feel like for future referential purposes I’d like to keep them a bit more organized.