How we built a Super Nintendo out of a wireless keyboard (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How we built a Super Nintendo out of a wireless keyboard (2012)

blog.adafruit.com

90 pointslelf11 comments

I’ve been really into the nRF52832 lately, a newer chip from the same company as the nRF24LE1 mentioned in the article. It has BLE, and you can find dev boards with all of the IO pins exposed for $5 (sometimes $2.50 on sale) on AliExpress, or impossibly tiny ones with chip antennas (six fit on a dime!) for closer to $15.

I just realized that the ones I have sitting around have roughly 64x the RAM, 32x the storage, and are (VERY roughly, I had trouble finding compatible numbers) 2,000 times as powerful processors. There’s so much more they could be doing!

That's funny to know every SD card have a MCU with performance of about 100 MHz on board.

It's amazing where you can find relatively powerful general purpose processors, and all the vulnerabilities that come with that reality. I like this article on the subject: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

If you are interested in that then you should also check out the Espressif ESP32.

It wasn't a Super Nintendo, and it wasn't built out of a wireless keyboard. Quality title.

The author of that article, Scanlime, is scary talented. They have a lot of videos up on YouTube that are a treat to watch.

Yep - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tQ-I_qFE0c is a good one, but you should also search for Coastermelt if you've never seen it before.

It looks like the company sifteo was aquihired and the cubes software wad opensourced but the actual hardware is now scarce. Just reading this article makes me fascinated with the project and as I have a young daughter who would probably benefit from a tactile gaming system like this I wonder how feasible it would be to resume production of the cubes or even hand craft them from components. I didn't see open CAD files on the GitHub repo but I did notice a UK professor has compiled all of the software and games and modded it to work without their central server. I doubt I have the time to mess with this anytime soon but it seems like it would be a awesome project to restart as a maker/hobbyist initiative.

I actually have some Sifteo hardware and some development docs—been wondering if anyone would benefit from having them to do independent Sifteo dev on.

Thanks for the heads-up. That actually makes me wonder whether it'd be worth resurrecting the hardware in some form, by building something compatible.

(2012) - Still cool though!

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