SD activity indicator for Wii

[DeadlyFoez] wanted to know when the SD card in his Nintendo Wii was in use. He built and indicator LED using a PICAXE 08M and added it next to the SD slot. He uses one pin of the microcontroller to monitor the voltage on one pin of the SD card slot. That pin has a specific value when the card is idle, which rises when it’s in use. He didn’t share the details of which pin he’s sampling, or what the magic number from his source code actually represents. But the concept should be enough of a start if you want to do this one yourself. Watch it go blink-ity-blink in the clip after the break.

Game Boy VGA using an FPGA

[ViDAR] was looking for a project to keep him occupied and settled on creating a VGA converter for his Game Boy. He had some difficulty finding pinouts for the LCD and CPU but working with what was known, and an oscilloscope, he found the necessary signal. Tap into just a few lines using those thin blue wires; Vsync, Hsync, clock, and two data pins. From there a development board with an Altera Cyclone II field-programmable gate array takes care of the heavy lifting. The board already has hardware for a VGA connection so it was just a matter of processing the incoming signals into the VGA standard. His demo video is embedded after the page break.
Want a dedicated solution? Check out this Game Boy video adapter inside a VHS cassette.

SNES arcade controller

[Daniel] is making a mini arcade cabinet with an SNES housed inside. He wanted to build an arcade controller for it and chose to construct something from scratch instead of destroying an original piece of hardware. We can almost feel you guys sighing with relief at that one. He sent us some nice photos of his build and pointed out that he’s using one of the Evilmadscientist AVR boards housing an ATtiny2313. The arcade buttons are readily available at sparkfun. The source code for this project is available after the break.

N64 Advance portable gaming system

Like many people [Kyle] loves the Nintendo 64 and decided he wanted a portable version of his beloved console so he could play games while on the move.  One year, two PSOne screens, and three N64 consoles later, his vision is complete.  A Game Boy Advance travel case was gutted and used to house the console, hence the “N64 Advance” moniker.  Like many others, his project uses a PSOne screen for the display, and a Li-Poly battery pack that provides up to 3.5 hours of playing time.  He made sure to include other members of the Nintendo family in his build by adding a pair DS Lite speakers to the mix.
This build also includes some nice “extras” such as having the N64 RAM expansion pack built-in, headphone and A/V out ports (with a screen kill-switch for TV use), and an external controller port that can be used by either the first or second player. Be sure to check out the video of his build after the jump.
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