My latest Gadget.. An emulator for old school gaming consoles built inside of an original NES Game Cartridge, Part 1.

I was looking around the internet, and I saw a blog post about something they called a Pi Cart.  After watching their video, and reading their descriptions, I decided to make one for my 9 year old son.

Here is a picture of my completed gadget.

What I did was take a very small single board computer called a Raspberry Pi Zero, and place it into a game cartridge from an old Nintendo Entertainment System(NES).  The NES was one of Nintendo's most popular gaming systems from the late 1980's.  

A picture of the internals of the cartridge.

When I viewed the original video, the author used hot glue to hold the components of the build in place. I opted for a stronger glue, as sometimes kids can just be a little rough on the things that they use.  The USB hub and cables along the front are all secured to the case with a glue called E6000.  I opted not to secure the pi zero to the case, so that the micro sd card can be removed, or that the pi zero could be salvaged from the case should my son loose interest in the emulator.              

The connections on the cartridge.

The connections on the emulator consist of an HDMI port for viewing the emulator on your TV.  3 USB ports for attaching either a game controller, keyboard or USB drive to load games onto the emulator. And a Micro USB port that supplies power to the Raspberry Pi Zero and USB Hub. 

There are a couple accessories that are needed:

The Game Controller.

The Power Adapter.

Source list for the parts required:

I received the cartridge itself from a co-worker of mine(thank you Jose).  The game controller, power adapter, and USB hub were ordered from Amazon.com.  The HDMI and Micro USB adapter were purchased from ebay.  The Raspberry Pi Zero and Micro SD card were picked up from Micro Center in Tustin.  The total cost of the parts to make the emulator was less than $40

That just about does it for the hardware portion of the emulator cartridge.  In the next part I will get into the software aspect of what it takes to make this work.