Thursday, July 11, 2013

Super Joy 3 NES on a Chip Modifications

As a preface to the ongoing project below, as usual I was wandering Ebay and I happened upon a used Super Joy 3 for $8 so I couldn't say no. It is a "Famiclone" or also known as a NOAC (Nintendo on a Chip) meaning it is a cheap Chinese reverse engineered custom ASIC of the original NES. The beautiful thing is that is has a onboard Famicom 60 pin slot to accept original games. This can be rewired to accept US NTSC 72 pin NES games. So I set about making these modifications in order to build my own tiny portable NES. The only thing that stands between me and my dream is that I lack a 72 pin NES cartridge connector and I dont want to buy one if I can help it. So how did I work around this problem? Ingenuity!

I simply took an old ATA PC motherboard and desoldered the PCI connector slots from it with the help of my handy heat gun (warning it may look like a hair dryer but it gets MUCH hotter!) as I noticed it was about the right fit for the NES cart edge connector.

One problem is that the 72 pin card is much too wide so I needed to cut and splice two sockets together. Here I marked off where to cut by opening up a NES cart for reference and used a small hacksaw.


Looked like a good fit. But the PCI slot has many more pins than necessary and the alignment was a little off so some had to be removed with pliers to insure there were no shorts.
Both sides were now finished so I set about finding the right fit and tediously testing each pin with my multimeter. Overall everything fits like a glove.

Now I needed to add some plastic spacers to connect both sides and give some mechanical rigidity
 so I added some scrap black ABS plastic cut to size with my Dremel and glued with some super glue.
Finally I soldered the 60 some pins with IDE ribbon cable and rechecked the connections with my multimeter. Notice how the center five pins which would be located at the black plastic are not connected on either side. This is because these were brought out to the bottom expansion port of the NES which was never used to I left these pins out.
This is where I left off for now. I still need to remove the Famicom cart slot from the Super Joy 3's PCB and solder in my FrankenCart Slot. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything works. If not then this was still a good exercise in modifications. I'll update this page when I make more progress.

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6 comments:

  1. RobertJanuary 14, 2014 at 11:48 PM

    Interesting post. The heat gun looks really like a hair dryer. I guess it is a very old model.

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    Replies
    1. sjm4306September 1, 2017 at 5:35 AM

      The heat gun is a heavy duty industrial model I got at a surplus vendor. A bit overkill but it works like a champ.

      Delete
  2. UnknownAugust 31, 2017 at 5:15 PM

    Did you get it to work or was the IDE cables too long? I'm having issues right now I'm making a NES front loader into a top loader using a game genie adapter but used about 8-10 inches of ide cable and I think it's too long to work because of interference. Your cables looks long too so I'm guessing blank screen too.

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    Replies
    1. sjm4306September 1, 2017 at 5:38 AM

      The wires are only about 4 inches and I had no problems with them. Perhaps the NOAC I used is less sensitive than a real NES, I couldn't say for sure but everything worked fine when I wired it up.

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    2. UnknownSeptember 6, 2017 at 9:36 AM

      Awesome, so glad it worked. I ended up soldering the game genie adapter directly to the nes motherboard pins. I never could figure out what the issue was but I think the tiny wire was the issue with me. I cut half the wire out spliced together and checked all the continuity still not worked I really hated to give up but think I could make next one work using solid 22ga copper wire. This custom console will be a side loader now but I'm putting a cool spin on it.

      Delete
  3. UnknownAugust 4, 2021 at 10:16 PM

    First....I suspect you are one of many clones as you are too smart to be just one guy!
    It really makes me nervous when I see that a connection to a site is not secure. As much as I do enjoy the content you provide, and despite that I have Internet security I am ultra-worried about my system being compromised by lingering on your site.

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