This is my NESPortable mod that I will be working on for the next couple of weeks. The purpose of this is to take the NES with me everywhere I want because I am cool like that and stuff.

Some things to know before reading/looking/thinking about building this. Yes it is easy, No i will not help you, and I've already done some testing before these pictures were taken (such as checking the output voltage of my screens regulator to make sure it can run off a 7.2 NiMH battery as well as checking the NES output voltage.)

First step is to take off the back case. There are 6 screws that hold it on. If you can't find them just give up now.



Next step is to take off the metal shielding for the game cartage holder. There are 4-6 screws holding it on.



Take off the screws holding the main board to the rest of the plastic case. There's 4-8 of them.
You also want to un screw the power and reset button as well as the player 1 and 2 controller connections.

This post was edited by AbDuCt on Jul 7 2012 03:48pm

Take off the pressure adding spring loaded cartage holder. There are 4 screws.



At this point you are ready for testing with your battery and screen.



Test was successful.

The following images show the removal of the caps and replacing them with new ones with longer legs to lay them on their side. Since the nes only runs 5v you can use a minimum of 6.3v caps although i bought random voltages because they were cheaper. ones a 100v another is a 50v and the last one is a 16v. The purpose of laying the caps down flat is so that you gain that little bit extra clearance which will make your portable that much thinner.

An easy way to get these caps out is to heat them from the back side and rock them left and right depending on the leg you are heating and slowly "wiggle" them out bit by bit.





the 1uf cap

the 100uf cap

the 2.2uf cap



a shot of the pcb showing all of the components laying flat and nothing really sticking up past anything else besides the rf box which is going to be removed next.

Okay so i forgot to take some pictures of the first steps so ill be as clear as possible. I am removing the useless expansion bay on the NES. First you must remove the metal shielding. To remove said shielding there are 4 small tabs on each corner of the shielding which you must pry up with a small flat head screwdriver.

After you take the shielding off take some needle nose pliers and break away the black plastic walls (make sure not to damage the pcb). After you get the outside walls off start to break off the plastic in between the pins.



The plastic walls are broken off and the middle plastic between the pins are gone.

The next step is to bend each pin back and forth until they break off. Do this to all of them so you only get the last piece of plastic like in the picture below.



The next think you do is CAREFULLY use your screwdriver and apply upwards pressure on the plastic and pop off the remaining plastic.

The next and last thing you do is bend off all the remaining pins so you get a nice clean area on the board. (you can desolder them off but i just bend them until they broke cleanly off)


Here is the finished mod. as you can see it created allot more room and made the board way thinner. The next step is to remove the pesky RF box. (which we would need to build our own 5v regulator and video amplifier because we are removing the rf box)

Time to remove the last two things that take up the most space, the RF box and the power/reset button connector.



start by desoldering and getting rid of the most solder you can off the 5 pins and the 4 tabs holding the RF box in place.



Then pop open the RF box from the other side.



Desolder the 7805 regulator. SAVE THIS YOU WILL NEED THIS FOR REBUILDING THE REGULATOR. What this does is take the input voltage, in my case 7.2 volts, and drop it down to 5 volts expelling the extra energy as heat. I personally saved the heatsink as well and cut it down to size in a later step.

Take the board out (It's soldered onto the case in a couple spots solder the best you can). Don't be afraid to snap the board taking it out there's nothing else we need in there beside the 2200uf capacitor.



Yea... I kinda mutilated that board. Harvest the 2200uf cap for our new regulator we are making. I also stole the other 100uf caps for future projects (mise well because they work still lol)



Picture of the board with the RF box gone. Time to remove the blue power/reset plug (because we removed the RF box these don't work anymore and serve no purpose to us unless you want to hook up a power LED in which case the very top pin is positive and the third one down is negative)

This post was edited by AbDuCt on Jul 20 2012 07:36pm