After 30 Years, Virtual Boy Gets its Chance to Shine https://hackaday.com/2026/02/03/after-30-years-virtual-boy-gets-its-chance-to-shine/
#Featured #History #NintendoHacks #OriginalArt #Emulation #Nintendo #NintendoSwitch #Virtualboy #Virtualreality

Super Mario 64, Now With Microtransactions https://hackaday.com/2026/01/06/super-mario-64-now-with-microtransactions/
#Games #NintendoHacks #Decompiled #Microtransactions #Nintendo64 #Supermario64

Super Mario 64, Now With Microtransactions

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/01/06/super-mario-64-now-with-microtransactions/

Arduino Provides No Fuss SNES-To-USB Conversion https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/arduino-provides-no-fuss-snes-to-usb-conversion/ #PeripheralsHacks #NintendoHacks #ArduinoHacks #superfamicom #snes #usb

Make Your Own Play Station (The Space Is Important) https://hackaday.com/2024/01/08/make-your-own-play-station-the-space-is-important/ #nintendoplaystation #PlaystationHacks #NintendoHacks #nintendo #sony

Frog Boy Color Reimagines The Game Boy Color Hardware From The Ground Up https://hackaday.com/2023/12/31/frog-boy-color-reimagines-the-game-boy-color-hardware-from-the-ground-up/ #NintendoGameBoyHacks #NintendoHacks #gameboycolor #nintendo #gameboy

NES Classic Metroid Ported to Equally Classic Super Nintendo https://hackaday.com/2023/12/24/nes-classic-metroid-ported-to-equally-classic-super-nintendo/ #NintendoHacks #retrogaming #videogames #videogames #nintendo #Games #snes

The Nintendo Switch CPU Exposed https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/the-nintendo-switch-cpu-exposed/ #NintendoSwitch #NintendoHacks #TegraX1 #ARM #arm

Resurrecting a Bricked Wii U with a Raspberry Pi Pico https://hackaday.com/2023/11/29/resurrecting-a-bricked-wii-u-with-a-raspberry-pi-pico/ #NintendoHacks #RepairHacks #nintendo #WiiU

Why Game Boy IPS Screens Flicker https://hackaday.com/2023/10/27/why-game-boy-ips-screens-flicker/ #NintendoGameBoyHacks #NintendoHacks #nintendo #gameboy #screen

Game Graphics: Racing The Beam https://hackaday.com/2023/10/24/game-graphics-racing-the-beam/ #computergraphics #NintendoHacks #racingthebeam #gamegraphics #OriginalArt #Featured #Interest #Games #games

Can an 8-Bit Light Gun Work on a Modern TV? https://hackaday.com/2023/10/17/can-an-8-bit-light-gun-work-on-a-modern-tv/ #NintendoHacks #lightgun #nintendo #Games #CRTTV #sega

Implementing MegaTextures on Real Nintendo 64 Hardware https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/implementing-megatextures-on-real-nintendo-64-hardware/ #NintendoHacks #mipmapping #nintendo64 #Games

Optimized Super Mario 64 Offers Exciting Possibilities

When working on any software project, the developers have to balance releasing on time with optimizations. As long as you are hitting your desired time constraints, why not just ship it earlier? It's no secret that Super Mario 64 , a hotly anticipated launch title for the Nintendo 64 console in 1996, had a lot of optimizations left on the table in order to get it out the door on time. In that spirit, [Kaze Emanuar] has been plumbing the depths of the code, refactoring and tweaking until he had a version with serious performance gains.

Why would anyone spend time improving the code for an old game that only runs on hardware released over two decades ago? There exists a healthy modding community for the game, and many of the newer levels that people are creating are more ambitious than what the original game could handle. But with the performance improvements that [Kaze] has been working on, your budget for larger and more complex levels suddenly becomes much more significant. In addition, it's rumored that a multi-player mode was originally planned for the game, but Nintendo had to scrap the feature when it was found that the frame rate while rendering two cameras wasn't up to snuff. With these optimizations, the game can now handle two players easily.

Luigi has been waiting 26 years for his chance to shine.

[Kaze] has a multi-step plan for improving the performance involving RAM alignment, compiler optimizations, rendering improvements, physics optimizations, and generally reducing "jankiness." To be fair to the developers at Nintendo, back then they were working with brand new hardware and pushing the boundaries of what home consoles were capable of. Modeling software, toolchains, compilers, and other supporting infrastructure have vastly improved over the last 20+ years. Along the way, we've picked up many tricks around rendering that just weren't as common back then.

The central theme of [Kaze]'s work is optimizing Rambus usage. As the RCP and the CPU have to share it, the goal is to have as little contention as possible. This means laying out items to improve cachability and asking the compiler to generate smaller code rather than faster code (no loop unrolling here). In addition, certain data structures can be put into particular regions of memory that are write-only or read-only to improve resource contention. Logic bugs are fixed and rendering techniques were improved. The initial results are quite impressive, and while he isn't done, we're very much looking forward to playing with the final product.

With the Nintendo 64 on its way to becoming a mainline-supported Linux platform, the old console is certainly seeing a lot of love these days.

#games #nintendohacks #softwaredevelopment #nintendo64 #refactoring #supermario64

Fix Every Broken Via To Return This Game To Life

We all know the havoc that water in the wrong place can do to a piece of electronics, and thus we've probably all had devices damaged beyond repair. Should [Solderking] have thrown away the water-damaged PCB from a Nintendo Pokemon Ruby cartridge? Of course he should, but when faced with a board on which all vias had succumbed to corrosion he took the less obvious path and repaired them.

Aside from some very fine soldering in the video below the break there's little unexpected. He removes the parts and tries a spot of reworking, but the reassembled board doesn't boot. So he removes them again and this time sands it back to copper. There follows a repair of every single vial on the board, sticking fine wires through the holes into a sponge and soldering the top, before turning it over and fixing the forest of wires on the other side. Fixing the ROM results in a rather challenging fitment involving the chip being mounted at an angle and extra wires going to its pads, which demonstrates the value in this story. It's not one of monetary value but of persevering with some epic rework to achieve a PCB which eventually boots. Of course a replacement board would make more sense. But that's not the point, is it?

#nintendohacks #repairhacks #nintendo #repair #rework #soldering

Solving Grounding Issues on Switch Audio

Grounding of electrical systems is an often forgotten yet important design consideration. Issues with proper grounding can be complicated, confusing, and downright frustrating to solve. So much so that engineers can spend their entire careers specializing in grounding and bonding. [Bsilvereagle] was running into just this sort of frustrating problem while attempting to send audio from a Nintendo Switch into a PC, and documented some of the ways he attempted to fix a common problem known as a ground loop.

Ground loops occur when there are multiple paths to ground, especially in wires carrying signals. The low impedance path creates oscillations and ringing which is especially problematic for audio. When sending the Switch audio into a computer a loop like this formed. [Bsilvereagle] set about solving the issue using an isolating transformer. It took a few revisions, but eventually they settled on a circuit which improved sound quality tremendously. With that out of the way, the task of mixing the Switch audio with sources from other devices could finally proceed unimpeded.

As an investigation into a nuisance problem, this project goes into quite a bit of depth about ground loops and carrying signals over various transforming devices. It's a great read if you've ever been stumped by a mysterious noise in a project. If you've never heard of a ground loop before, take a look at this guide to we featured a few years ago.

#nintendohacks #audio #ground #groundloop #mixing #nintendo #pc #signal #switch #transformer

Nintendo Switch Runs Vita Software With vita2hos

Good news for fans of PlayStation Vita -- a new project from [Sergi "xerpi" Granell] allows users to run software written for Sony's erstwhile handheld system on Nintendo's latest money printing machine, the Switch. To be clear, there's a very long road ahead before the vita2hos project is able to run commercial games (if ever). But it's already able to run simple CPU-rendered Vita homebrew binaries on the Switch, demonstrating the concept is sound.

Running a Vita CHIP-8 emulator on the Switch. Credit: Modern Vintage Gamer

On a technical level, vita2hos is not unlike WINE, which enables POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS, and BSD to run Windows programs so long as they use the same processor architecture. Since the Switch's ARM v8 processor is capable of executing code compiled for the Vita's ARM v7 while running in 32-bit compatibility mode, there's no emulation necessary. The project simply needs to provide the running program with work-alike routines fast enough, and nobody is the wiser. Of course, that's a lot easier said than done.

According to the project page, the big hurdle right now is 3D graphics support. As you could imagine, many Vita games would have been pushing the system's graphical hardware to the limit, making it exceptionally difficult to catch all the little edge cases that will undoubtedly come up when and if the project expands to support commercial titles. But for homebrew Vita games and utilities that may not even utilize the system's 3D hardware, adding compatibility will be much easier. For instance, it's already able to run [xerpi]'s own CHIP-8 emulator.

[xerpi] provides instructions on how to install vita2hos and the Vita executable to be tested onto an already hacked Nintendo Switch should you want to give it a shot. But unless you've got experience developing for the Vita or Switch and are willing to lend a hand, you might want to sit this one out until things mature a bit.

Thanks to [NeoTechni] for the tip.

#nintendohacks #homebrew #nintendoswitch #playstationvita #translationlayer #wine

Game Boy Becomes Super Game Boy with a Pair of Pis

For the Nintendo aficionados of the 90s, the Super Game Boy was a must-have cartridge for the Super Nintendo which allowed gamers to play Game Boy games on your TV. Not only did it allow four-color dot-matrix gaming on the big screen, but it let you play those favorite Game Boy titles without spending a fortune on AA batteries. While later handhelds like the PSP or even Nintendo Switch are able to output video directly to TVs without issue, the original Game Boy needed processing help from an SNES or, as [Andy West] shows us, it can also get that help from a modern microcontroller.

Testing the design before installing it in the NES case.

The extra processing power in this case comes from a Raspberry Pi Pico which is small enough to easily fit inside of a donor NES case and also powerful enough to handle the VGA directly. For video data input, the Pico is connected to the video pins on the Game Boy's main board through a level shifter. The main board is also connected to a second Pico which handles the controller input from an NES controller. Some fancy conversion needed to be done at this point because although the controller layouts are very similar, they are handles by the respective consoles completely differently.

With all of the technical work largely out of the way, [Andy] was able to put the finishing touches on the build. These included making sure the power buttons, status LEDs, and reset button all functioned, and restoring the NES case complete with some custom "Game Guy" graphics to match the original design of the Game Boy. We commend the use of original Game Boy hardware in this build as well, which even made it possible for [Andy] and his wife to play a head-to-head game of Dr. Mario through a link cable with another Game Boy. If you're looking for a simpler way of playing on original hardware without burning a hole in your wallet buying AA batteries, take a look at this Game Boy restoration which uses a Lithium battery instead.

Thanks to [BaldPower] and [adistuder] from the Hackaday Discord server for sending this one in.

#classichacks #nintendohacks #controller #gameboy #microcontroller #nes #original #pico #raspberrypi #restoration #snes #supergameboy #vga #video