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NES PC

Malicious sent us to a little tutorial about transforming that old Nintendo into a PC. This guide will even make your controllers work, although it seems to me that a nintendo that has survived this long might be a cherished heirloom tho. Does anyone else think that Super Mario 3 might have been the best game ever? Course very few people make good sidescroller/jumpers in the era of the 3D console.

41 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. SMB3? by Havokmon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Nothing compares to Bubble Bobble, with Bub and Bob the brontosaurs buddies..

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  2. Best Game by xo0bob0ox · · Score: 5, Funny

    well, one of the best, Track and Field. I remember trying to do the 100 dashes and having you thumb fall of becuase you had to punch the controller so hard.

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    1. Re:Best Game by gid · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hell ya, I totally agree with everything that articles says. I was looking for a controller for my dreamcast a couple years back and wasn't happy with anything on the market at the time. The NES Advantage was a joystick that acted like joystick when you need it to, but didn't have the DISadvantage that some joysticks have over gamepads with certain games.

      THE most durable, intuitive, and easiest to use joystick use ever. The weight and size was perfect for almost all hands of all sizes.

      Forget the max, I want a joystick, not a pad.

  3. Random Mods by Acidangl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do you ever think we will reach a point where a comptuer has been modded into every possible thing? I"ve seen a toaster, vcr, and now a nintendo. If i could find the link to the guy who modded a computer into a RC i would post it.

    --
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  4. Dude by Almace · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is what happens when the Dell kid smokes pot!!

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    Remember,democracy never lasts long.It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. John Adams (1814)
  5. Get the whistle! by Nick+of+NSTime · · Score: 3, Informative
    I loved Super Mario 3. I remember seeing that movie The Wizard and it showed how to get the warp whistle. Ah, the good old days.

    There is a resurgence of 2D games, sort of. Contra for PS2 is a good example.

    1. Re:Get the whistle! by Bonker · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Back in the day, a grocery store near my house-- I say near my house. It was 3 miles away. 10 minutes on a fast bike-- got an NES Choice Ten standup machine. It had a few titles in it, but the one I noticed as being most prominent was a strange game labeled 'SMB3' in blue without any logos or identifying marks.

      Curious, I put a quarter in and got my 300 seconds of playtime. I selected 'SMB3' and was rewarded with the home play version (not the later choice ten version where you could select the level) of 'Super Mario Bros. 3'.

      "This has to be a hack of some kind," I said, "Like that stupid Skater Brothers rip of Super Mario".

      Mind you, this was more than four months before 'Wizard' had hit theaters and about six before you could actually buy SMB3 in stores. They weren't even advertisting SMB3 in Nintendo Power. Of course, back then, video games didn't quite have the 3 years of hype before release they tend to now. The only thing that I can figure is that the owner of the arcade machine managed to get a beta copy of the game or had a friend in Nintendo USA who 'fixed' his Choice-10 roms for him with the new game.

      To my surprise, however, SMB3 was not a hack or a copy of an existing game. It was its own game, and a surprisingly good one at that. I came the next day with my allowance-- $10 in quarters. 12000 seconds... a little more than 3 hours of game play. As a matter of fact, I spent the next three saturdays like that. I must have blown $80 just on that one stupid Choice Ten machine.

      By the time 'Wizard' was released in theaters, SMB3 was old hat to me. 'Wizard' was merely confirmation that I had somehow gained access to the real deal.

      After 'Wizard', summer was approaching, so I could start to mow lawns for money. On the day of release, I called Wal-mart (35 minutes away on bike) every 15 minutes. When the truck finally came in and they had release copies, I got the electronics manager to promise to hold a copy for me. I biked up, only to find that he had sold all the copies he had (35, I think) to a dealer. Of course SMB2 had been fetching insane prices at Christmas a few years previously, so it was seen as a good invenstment to buy all the copies of an popular videogame you could and resell them.

      I finally managed to get a copy the next week, which I promptly brought home and played after carefully re-reading the manual for about an hour at a local Wendy's. My brother, the bastard, ratted me out for spending my lawn-mowing money on a video game (A big no-no in my house, especially since my grades were starting to slip). My mom took the game away and hid it. Luckily for me, she didn't destroy it.

      SMB3 was and still is a hell of a game. I still play it from time to time.

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    2. Re:Get the whistle! by LighthouseJ · · Score: 5, Funny

      What I liked is as soon as Jimmy Woods (The Wizard) got the whistle, the girl with them said "use the whistle to warp to the next level" or something like that and I remember thinking "how the fuck does she know that?"

      For your records: The Wizard

  6. Metroid by Tattva · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think it's obvious that the original Metroid was the best game ever. That thing creeped me out and got my heart racing with only 8 bits.

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    personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
  7. more infos by odyrithm · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/ for more info and http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/ for many more like it.

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    moo
  8. I always knew this needed to be done... by stephenisu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did you know that in japan it had modem option? Limited runs of "online" shopping and stock trading was done.

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  9. Re:Thats it, people. by brodiedreamyou.ca · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not EVERYONE reads the articles!!

    it's about replacing the guts of a nes with normal pc parts, and does not mention running linux at all

  10. Re:Thats it, people. by ch-chuck · · Score: 5, Funny

    I just picked up an Atari Super Pong for $15 at a hamfest. Works! Will start porting Linux to it this weekend.

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  11. Best Game Ever by Skizamaskidz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Tecmo Super Bowl (NES). By far the best sports game, if not the best game in general. Anyone else agree?

  12. How about Kirby's Adventure? by Tickenest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a shame that Kirby's Adventure came out so late in the life cycle of the NES, but this one is about as good as it can get in a 2D platformer. I won't argue whether it's better than SMB3 or not because they're both great. Shameless plug for my NES Contra site here.

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  13. Don't Do It Guys! by Quaoar · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you mod your Nintendo, you won't be able to log into NES Live!

    --
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  14. I like Mario 2 better by Nanite · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I preferred Super Mario Brothers 2. Such a total departure from the first game made it unique. I remember my grandmother fought people in a Target to get a copy for my birthday. :)

    I also played the original Japanese game it was based on Doki-Doki Panic. Ahhh fun times...

    --
    God is real unless declared integer.
  15. Nintendo PC? by hafree · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When the first step is to gut the existing components and install a motherboard and CPU, is that really considered making a PC out of your Nintendo? Sounds more like just a project to make a PC fit into the old Nintendo case...

  16. super mario 3 rules... I think by AssFace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I was growing up I never had any game consoles. My dad and grandfather each had 286/386/486/etc over time and each started with Apple][gs - so I had access to games on those - but was never allowed a console (mainly due to money, no ethics on behalf of my parents or anything).

    My friends had the consoles though and I would play them when I went over to their houses.
    As a result, I liked games that I could pick up quickly and not die immediately without lots of experience (Zelda was bad for that, Excitebike was GOOD!!).
    I never really got good at any of the games since I wouldn't get much time to play (none of my friends wanted to watch me play, but they were fine with me watching them :) ).

    Then the summer of '99 after I graduated college, I had a month to kill before I started my job - so I spent it at my dad's girlfriend's house sleeping and then playing her son's Super Nintendo. He had some special game pack that had all of the Super Mario games on there.
    I played so much that I had some sort of injury to my right hand - specifically thumb blisters.
    I finally got to beat each of the series but I kept going back to one to play it over and over - loved it - I *think* it was SM3 - not sure though. Whichever one first introduced Yoshi the dinosaur - I loved it (although the one just before that was pretty cool too).
    I've played variants since then and never liked them that much.

    Now I have a PS2 and suck at pretty much all of the games to the point where I get too frustrated to play for more than 10 minutes - except at the Tiger Woods golf game - I rule at that.

    What were the traits of SM3? I'm not sure if that is the one that I really loved - I think so, but I don't recall the names of all of them and which did which in the series.

    --

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    1. Re:super mario 3 rules... I think by rworne · · Score: 4, Funny

      Because it a Japanese game? Foxes and raccoons are supposed to have magical or "trickster" qualities.

      Which reminds me of this little Japanese ditty:
      TanTanTanuki no kintama wa, kaze mo nai no ni burabura

      Translation:
      Even when there's no wind, the balls of a raccoon swing to and fro.

      You night not think very much of it, that is until you actually see how big a tanuki's nads are.

      --
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  17. assembly programming NES style by falconed · · Score: 3, Funny

    shr...shr...mov...jmp! jmp!

    (system crashes)

    damn register boss!

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  18. Re:Thats it, people. by teamhasnoi · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have just succeeded in porting Linux to Linux! Linux now runs Linux! I haven't been able to get the sound to work, though.

  19. sidescrollers/jumpers by blueskatz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a good sidescroller/jumper in the age of 3D, check out Viewtiful Joe, being released by Capcom in September.

    I've also heard of a Castlevania project in the works by Konami as well - let's hope this one is a 2D sidescroller along the lines of Symphony of the Night

  20. Best game? by Bendebecker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mario 3 was a really great game. However, IMO it is slightly overrated by its market sucess. There were far less popular games that were a even better than Mario. For example: StarTropics, Crystalis, The Immortal. They don't make games like they used to...

    --
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    most of us won't be able to afford it.
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  21. My working NES by siphoncolder · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I had to inform the crowd about this one. I still have a working NES, complete with 2 controllers and the light-gun. I have all the Marios, both the Zeldas, Hogan's Alley to go with the light-gun, and 2 working controllers. All my games still work (although I have to blow dust off the cartridge connectors from time to time).

    I would NEVER, EVER mod it to do this. The NES as it is STILL provides me with hours of entertainment, something most PC games these days can't do. Turning it into something like a webserver would totally ruin it for me.

    --
    i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
  22. mini ITX by Lxy · · Score: 4, Informative

    More interesting than the article itself is the motherboard. You can pick up a micro ITX board for $90 here. I think you could gut out an old CDROM drive, pop in this board, put a laptop HD and CDROm inside, and have your very own LittlePC. LittlePCs run around $900, you could probably build one a lot cheaper (and have a lot more fun doing it).

    --

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    :wq
  23. next on /. by QEDog · · Score: 5, Funny

    how to mod your NES to make it a projectile from a 5 story building.

    --
    "There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
    1. Re:next on /. by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Funny

      Does this involve the "hardware acceleration" of 9.81 m/s^2?

      --
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  24. Re:Thats it, people. by Tet · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I have just succeeded in porting Linux to Linux! Linux now runs Linux!

    Of course, the amusing thing about this is that you're right. Linux really does run Linux now...

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  25. Silly idea... by earthloop · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm going to do something nobody has done for a long time. I'm going to go out and buy an ATX motherboard along with all the ancillaries (spelling?) and stick them in a metal box with holes in the front for my CD-ROM drive and floppy drive. The front will also have suitable buttons for power and reset. Round the back I think I should be able to find suitable openings for those PCI cards I'm going to put on the Mobo. Do you know what, I'll give it a name, a PeeCee! Nobody cares anymore. Yes, ITX mobos were once cool, but now you can get them just about anywhere for less than £100.

  26. Seen this before a few times by FatalTourist · · Score: 3, Informative

    At Mini-ITX.com.
    There was a even a company selling converted NES-to-PCs or kits or something. Ah! Here's the link.
    They also do Atari 2600s and Amiga 1000s (I would never defile my A1000!).

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  27. Re:Thats it, people. by z_gringo · · Score: 4, Funny

    There are Articles?

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    -- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
  28. The Mario series by yerricde · · Score: 4, Informative
    • SMB 1: First game. Now sold as "Super Mario Bros. Deluxe".
    • SMB 2 The Lost Levels: SMB 1 with harder levels. Now a hidden stage in "Super Mario Bros. Deluxe" for players who play for points.
    • SMB 2 Mario Madness: Doki Doki Panic CHR-hacked with Mario characters. Pull vegetables out of the ground and throw them at your enemies. Now sold as "Super Mario Advance".
    • SMB 3: First game to use 4-way scrolling on one map (levels were 27 blocks tall on a 15.5x12 window). Fly up to the top half of the level with the leaf that gives you a raccoon tail. Scheduled to be rereleased on GBA as "Super Mario Advance 4 or 5" depending on whether or not Yoshi's Story is labeled SMA.
    • SMW: The raccoon tail has become a cape, and you can ride Yoshi. Now sold as "Super Mario Advance 2".
    • SMW 2 Yoshi's Island: You control Yoshi trying to carry Mario home. Now sold as "Super Mario Advance 3".
    • SM 64: Enter framed paintings in a castle and collect the stars.
    • SM 65 Sunshine: Enter graffiti paintings in an island resort and collect the sta^H^H^H shines.
    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  29. Mirror, mirror on the wall by paulproteus · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have mirrored the site here, inside AT&T's network block.

    When the traffic normalizes, I'll remove the mirror.

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    |/usr/games/fortune
  30. Does anybody remember who made Olympic Decathlon? by newsdee · · Score: 3, Funny

    Haw! Now that you mention it, I remember who made Olympic Decathlon... MICROSOFT!

    I don't remember any blue screens back then, but you had to change your keyboard every other month. They obviously had a deal with keyboard makers. :-)

  31. About that Tanuki suit... by Rahga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Basicly, the there's a Japanese story about a Tanuki (bah, racoon) outsmarting a Fox in a transformation contest. Essentially, it start in many cases with the Fox transforming into a statue, stealing riceballs offered up to the statue by the Tanuki. After revealing himself, it was time for the Fox to see if he could find a transformed Tanuki. Overconfident, he came across a king's caravan, and called out for it to stop and the Tanuki to reveal himself. However, the Tanuki had not even transformed, and merely watched as the Fox was assailed by the king's army.

    It goes something like that, at least. :)

  32. Re:Finally, a use for all these things... by bludstone · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is fairly easy to fix a Blinking Nes. The NES was poorly designed and the connector pins bend out over time. In order to fix this all you need to do is a buy a new pin cartridge connector.

    Its also a good idea to clean your Carts. Wipe down the pins with a q-tip and some rubbing alcohol. It works great.

    Right now Ive got almost all of the NES games I want. I still need to pick up metal gear and contra.

    Nothing Like playing metroid, zelda, and the megaman games on an old NES. Mmmmm nostagic.

    --

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  33. That was completely untrue and NOT informative. by Rahga · · Score: 4, Informative

    The vast majority of NES systems need little work to get past the problems you are talking about, and for what it's worth, those problems show up on every cart-based system.

    First of all, the easiest and most successful thing to do would be to replace the cartridge connector. These are all pretty cheap on eBay, right around $10, just search for "NES 72".

    Secondly, the blinking red light problem is a result of the NES not finding the on-game security chip. Really annoying when the game title screen pops up just for a second over and over again. There's an easy workaround: Disable the NES security chip. Basicly, you'll break pin 4 of the CIC chip, and that's it. http://nintendope.iodized.net/thisoldnes/lock.txt

  34. Re:Crazy Luck by Bonker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I recall one evening while me and my younger brother were playing SMB3, my brother threw this temper tantrum over one particular map somewhere around world 5 or so; in his rage he slammed his fist down on the desktop, near the NES. When he did, the NES reset the game and started him over at the intro screen. Pissed, he said a string of choice words and stomped off. I picked up the controller and started a new game, and on a whim checked Mario's inventory; it still retained all of my brother's items from his previous game ;-) So there I was, in the first world, with a few Tanoki suits, a Whistle, and a few other assorted not-supposed-to-haves. That was pretty cool ;-)

    There were a few exploits like that, simply because SMB was probably the hugest game ever created at that point, with the possible exception of the Zelda games. I have roms for all the Mario and Zelda games, so I'll compare them and see. I suspect that SMB3 is larger than even quite a few snes games.

    Some of the exploits were left in on purpose or purposefully included in the first place as 'easter eggs'. Some of them were obvious coding errors.

    The reset items trick was something that a few players did after beating the game to start over with all the inventory intact. If you timed your reset to hit just before the game credits stopped, you could usually do this.

    Another was the keypad combination that would let you reenter any non-moving area, even destroyed castles. Since hammer brothers dissapeared after you killed them and airships took you to the next level, this would obviously not work.

    If you won an airship level while wearing the Frog, Tanuki, or Hammer suit, the king would greet you with a non-standard text string.

    Many places in the game, there are 'infinite lives' locations. The first one that comes to mind is the mushroom sprouting pipe in 1-2, I think. If you had a leaf, (and a racoon tail), you could float down. If you timed it right, you could float down just slow enough to land on a mushroom, kill him, jump off, and float down again on top of the next one. If you had your timing down, you could run out the level timer doing this, racking up massive extra lives... to a total of 99, I think. Unlike the 'Eternal Turtle' exploit in SMB1 (In 3-1 and 7-1... doesn't seem to work in 'Allstars'), the life counter in SMB3 did not roll over at 128, so you could get as many lives as you wanted this way. Another location was in the desert world. You could throw a turtle shell into the space between two pipes and then watch mushrooms walk into it. Each mushroom would eventually be worth an extra life.

    The one that strikes me as the most obvious coding error was in the end-of-game encounter with Bowser/King Koopa. For those in the know, depending on which route you took through his castle, Bowser had a different difficulty. There were either three or four layers of blocks for him to punch through, depending on how you reached him. In reality, however, there were two Bowsers in the game, one for each location. Here's the trick, though. The two areas they fought in (one with three layers of blocks and one with four layers of blocks) were connected. If you could fly, you could travel back and forth between the two, and have both alive at the same time. If both of them were alive, neither one could shoot fire!

    Ah, them were the days, when you were intent on finding *all* the secrets of a game and had months on end to do so.

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  35. Re:Next up... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The latest several versions of NesterDC do not suffer this problem. It plays games flawlessly as far as I can tell (I'm sure it's not falwless, but nearly so). It also supports state saving and other goodies (turbo controller emulation, game genie, etc.). My NesterDC disc is by far my favorite dreamcast game; it is a fantastic emulator.

    See DCEmulation for more emulators for DC.

  36. Favorite SMB3 Trick by localman · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, not a trick really - it was just the coolest bonus for winning a game ever, IMHO... when you won the game, if you started over without reseting the machine you would find yourself with a full inventory (27 items) of "p-wings" ... these are very rare items in the game up to that point, and allow you to fly continuously through a whole level, provided you don't get hit.

    You could then explore all sorts of stuff that would have been impossible before... lots of hidden things to find, etc. What a blast!

    For a while my friends and I would start an SMB3 session by winning the game (we got it down to a 30 minute process using both warp whistles) and then we'd go to some of the more difficult worlds with our p-wing collection and have a ball.

    Damn those were good times... I don't think there's any game out there that's been more fun, or had more replay value for my dollar.

    Cheers!