Worklog Lockdown 64

[Akira]

Corona!

Our country (The Netherlands) is in full lockdown, and has been for months. Life is getting boring, and after cleaning and sorting my house I found a project box from an old Nintendo 64 portable.
Now that I have more time on my hands I might as well try and finish it. And I might as well blog about it.

I tried and make this back in 2014 i think. And i know the board broke down, because i was too hasty with relocating something.

Ill index what i have and give it a go.

 

[Akira]

I can hopfully make this work

I am going to make a new front piece, mainly because I wired things "old school" there are better solutions now all thanks to the community

I found a mainboard that still works that is the same as I used before. Saves me a lot of time of sorting tings out when trimming the board.

For some reason my monitor doesn't like composite n64 pal signal.. That's why the distortion on the monitor. It's working on a regular TV..

 

[Gman]

I remember following the gameboy64 worklog back in the day, cant wait to see this!

 

[Downing]

Akira!!! Long time no see my friend! It'll be awesome to see how this turns out!

 

[Akira]

Thanks! Its good to see that this hobby matured. 3D Printing, custom pcb for anything, microcontrollers, custom coding. The sky is the limit.
My limit will be what i can find in the box of stuff

Akira!!! Long time no see my friend! It'll be awesome to see how this turns out!

Hey! We meet again old tweaker!

Now that you are still active. I have a question. I found 5 pieces of RDC mini64 v2 (not V2.1) and want to use them. Cant find any guides anymore.

The populated the board with the parts, but some aren't populated or labeled.
What is J0 for ? (jumper 0,0 Ohm?)

I tried to hook it up, but giving me no controller error on the n64

i dont know what happened to the mini64 v1 , but i think it survived a nuclear blast

 

[Akira]

Never mind Downing! I got it to work. I had to jumper R7 as well. I found a pic of someone's project, who installed it with a CNT-NUS controller IC.

 

[Akira]

I got the mini64 to work and tested the stick i got for the project.

 

[Akira]

I refurbished the everdrive from the old project, that was a real mess of wires on all the contacts, cleaned it up, re-relocated everything back and added a micro sd slot to it for testing.

Thankfully, this also still works!

 

[Akira]

Today i swapped the 2 x 2MB Ramchips with 2 x 4MB.

And i soldered up the jumperpack onto the board. If you want to solder up like this you also need 1 extra wire on the backside.

And I removed some ports and things.

 

[Gman]

Very nice job! I tried a similar jumper pak shortcut a little while ago and could not get it working. I had to do a 90 degree desolder - resolder slot instead.

 

[Akira]

Very nice job! I tried a similar jumper pak shortcut a little while ago and could not get it working. I had to do a 90 degree desolder - resolder slot instead.

Thanks, you also need to solder 1 wire on the back

and make triple , quad. No 10 times sure there are no shorts before you turn it on.
But i dont have to tell you

 

[Gman]

I see. By default the trace is connected on the top of the motherboard but you remove the copper to prevent shorts on the components.

 

[goosewerks]

View attachment 16204

/QUOTE]

Just so I know for sure, you removed all the pins from the jumper pack slot and dropped the jumper pack components directly on top of the blank board and only the wires you've soldered are connected, correct? Nothing underneath the components? I see you ran a wire on the back of the board as well.

 

[Akira]

I also removed all the leg points from the board, cutting away all the copper and making a clear area. There are a lot of edges which you could solder and make a short.

Careful..

 

[Akira]

I wired up the regulators and got one of those "new" nifty play n charge boards. No need to wire it up like the old days

And got it running of some test batteries

Then i started removing parts

Then I got the first cut done. I can trim off more seeing people here relocate U3.

On the bottom where the bend memory port normally goes, I got a lot higher and closer to the ram thanks to the jumper pack relocation.

Still works !

 

[Akira]

Long evening of soldering.

just some pics. I removed the cartridge slot and started relocating things and wiring the everdrive to the board.

On the left a game and on the right a nintendo 64 with 2 4MB Ram, jumperpack and everdrive

its a bit on life support at the moment. but i am tired and just wanted to wire it upand and see some life.

Good night!

 

[Gman]

Epic!

 

[Akira]

Alright, so now I beefed up the boards with ground and power lanes. And added heat sinks to the ram and CPU/GPU.



I have let it run for 3 hours without any problems. And the heat sinks feel warm but I can keep my finger on them without burning.

I had to move the crystal oscillator X1 to make room for the case fan. It's all working fine.

But the video signal craps out when I touch the X1 during gameplay. I replaced it, added more ground and power lines to it.

Added more caps to the signal. But it stays very sensitive. Not really a problem because you won't touch it anyway when it's closed.


Any thoughts or tips on this? Also seems like its in tandem with some wires from the NUS IC. But not always.



But in the end it's all working amazingly well.

 

[Emetsys]

This is really nice.
The only thing that I could say is to try it in a case, because when the cable are flying it is quite nice but when you close it you sometimes discover that you would need some shielded wires.

 

[Gman]

X1 is the oscillator for 48Mhz clock to the RCP and the video encoder. If you decrease the stability of this signal it will halt the n64