A new (old) Nintendo console! - TinyNES
**The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Upgrading Kit: A Comprehensive Review**
In this article, we will delve into the world of retro gaming and explore the NES upgrading kit, specifically focusing on its capabilities and limitations. This kit is designed to upgrade the original NES console with modern components, allowing enthusiasts to enjoy improved picture quality and reduced composite artifacts.
**The Kit's Performance**
When connected to a CRT TV, the kit produces a clean and composite output, with minimal artifacts visible. The floor of the screen appears not quite where it should be, but this is considered normal behavior for this game. In contrast to other retro consoles, such as Mega Man, which exhibited more pronounced fringing, the NES kit's picture quality is noticeably better.
**Sound Quality**
The sound output from the kit is excellent, with crisp and clear audio that rivals original hardware. This is a significant improvement over the composite artifacts that plagued some games on older consoles.
**Comparison to Original Hardware**
In comparison to the original NES console, the kit produces significantly fewer composite artifacts, making it a notable upgrade for enthusiasts who want to reduce these issues. However, it's worth noting that the kit's performance may vary depending on the specific game being played.
**The Kit's Design and Build Quality**
The kit is designed with a focus on ease of use and minimalism. The components are well-packaged and include a convenient allen wrench for disassembling the console. The design also allows for easy replacement of individual components, such as the picture processing unit (PPU) or CPU.
**Component Layout and Socketing**
The kit includes the original NES PPU and CPU, which are socketed to allow for easy replacement with modern alternatives. This feature makes it possible to upgrade the console with improved hardware, reducing composite artifacts and enhancing overall performance.
**Power Supply and Compatibility**
The kit is powered by a USB Type-C adapter, which is a convenient and modern alternative to the original NES's AC power supply. However, this may be a concern for users who prefer traditional power sources or require more than 5V from their adapters.
**Practicality and Value**
While the kit offers significant improvements over original hardware, its value is limited by its complexity and cost. For enthusiasts looking for a DIY project, the kit may be an attractive option, but for those seeking a hassle-free experience, it may not be the best choice.
**Recommendation**
Overall, we recommend the NES upgrading kit to hobbyists and enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with retro consoles. However, due to its high cost and complexity, we would advise against purchasing it for practical use. Instead, consider alternative solutions, such as a Raspberry Pi or Mister setup, which offer similar performance at a lower price point.
**Conclusion**
The NES upgrading kit is an interesting project that offers enthusiasts the opportunity to improve their retro gaming experience. While it excels in picture quality and sound output, its high cost and complexity make it less practical for everyday use.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's retro time and this is an NES a North American Nintendo if you will the Nintendo Entertainment System this is rather large for what you might consider to be a rather old and not very powerful piece of Hardware but this was expandable that was the big thing like you could use custom chips to make sure that your games would run whatever you wanted them to run basically it kind of reinvigorated the video game Market in the west so much so that if Atari hadn't died they would have licensed to this as the AVS but Nintendo came back and they gave us this today this is well I mean you can you can tell the shell that has yellowed quite a bit like that's that's real Hollow right and it's it's kind of pointless so um there's this project called tininess and what that does is it just kind of condenses everything you know makes it more I mean compact like the box for this is actually smaller physically than the NES itself so let's put this to the side here and have a look at this we've got kind of a preview on the box here as to how big the actual console is it's not the size of the Box on the side here we've got kind of sort of public domain it's not quite this is a fairly permissive license you can I think build this yourself it's not open source though made by tall Dog Electronics which I think is that a main wolf don't know a tinyness tinyness genuine okay this is where we need to talk about what the tininess is the tininess isn't a modern Recreation of the console it's literally the guts from this shrunk down into this the way they're able to do that is by harvesting chips out of those old consoles or in the case of the non-genuine version there are actually clone chips you can get that are completely I think they still make them or at least they're still available they're not great in terms of compatibility I think and some graphical glitches can happen but you can still build one of these completely from scratch without any official Nintendo components which is just great and on the back here we get another preview of what it looks like this time in 3D instruction manual of some kind so it's powered by a 5 volt DC which enters the USBC Jack on the rear of the console okay so I will need a USBC power supply okay yep they have a provided USBC power adapter and black and gold usb-c cable you know what I'm just going to not read this any further because it seems like something I could just find out by unboxing it and that's a lot more interesting isn't it let's just pull this out of here and is this an actually just an apple USBC adapter it's got an apple model number on it either that or it's a clone it doesn't feel like it's lightweight or anything so it's probably legit or legit enough for our purposes anyway that's pretty adorable so I guess this uses a trrs connector here to split off into the RCA outputs yeah this doesn't have HDMI or anything fancy like that it's just the original type of outputs that you would have gotten on the NES itself unless you were like me back in the day and you used this which is even worse let's see we've got a tall dog sticker and an allen wrench I guess they intend you to open it up which is great because I'm going to do that and here is the console itself that actually looks really sharp and it's so tiny like okay it's a little bit shorter in this Dimension than an NES cartridge okay a little bit wider and yeah a little bit thicker as well games I suppose just go in like that with the label facing that way oh that's interesting there's actually already RCA jacks on the back of this so apparently the this connector here that goes in here splits out all of the individual audio channels so if you've got expansion audio in your Japanese famicom game then you can get that and mix it separately from the built-in audio so I guess if your game is too loud on the expansion audio which is the thing that can happen you can kind of mix it separately or you can just mix it the way you want to interesting I'm not sure why also apparently this can be configured for RGB output and I'm not sure how you would do that exactly remember what I said the license for this thing was pretty permissive well here is the block diagram of the whole console it's just right there find all the components and you can put them together in the same way that the console is put together which is pretty sick they even have the bill of materials here and according to this you can install an RGB capable picture Processing Unit or PPU the original NES didn't actually have RGB output in the traditional sense it's PPU basically just spat out more or less composite video which has been an issue for a while because if you've ever noticed that like emulators and Wii virtual console and everything thing else seems to have different colors that's why what colors you were supposed to get out of the NES were not really set in stone they varied from console to console basically back to the console itself we do have our video we've got the reset button back here which is kind of an interesting place to put it because some games kind of relied on the reset button on and off switch back here that works it's kind of sharp I would have preferred maybe a larger switch but it is powered with type c on the front we've got traditional NES controller ports so I can plug in my traditional controller my NES advantage or if I had a CRT to plug this into my zapper I don't have one of those here today though and on the other side there's nothing oh right there is one more thing and that's this little dial down here it's a potentiometer that is what you would use to adjust the levels of the balance of the the internal audio and the expansion audio like I was explaining earlier in case you're only using the onboard output and that's basically it this thing is super basic aside from that we've got some I guess nice looking but basic cables for uh audio video that's literally all you get if you got your your mono channel for audio and you've got your video and we've got this nice uh USB type-c cable they're all braided which is nice I'll get these out of here and we'll power it on but first i'm going to talk to you about our sponsor vesi thanks to vesi for sponsoring today's video soggy sock season is upon us which means smelly foot season is also upon us and it's time to put those boat shoes back on the Shelf vesi makes water resistant sneakers that offer you reassurance when the weather report simply can't and trust me right now uh in Vancouver it really can't their Diamond text material will keep you warm in the winter good thing and cool in the summer also a good thing because then you have sweaty feet right they're comfy breathable and lightweight they're also 100 cruelty free and vegan down to the glue they use keep your feet dry and save 25 with offer code short circuit at vessey.com Short Circuit now before we get into this I got a Game Genie here yep okay sure that's that's not weird oh oh oh oh oh that's a tight fit oh okay so one thing you might have noticed is that took quite a bit of effort to get in and out in contrast the original NES a lot easier all right let's power this thing up uh you got me a monitor I was just setting up to well set this up when I realized that we have some more boxes here we have a cartridge latch not sure what that's about maybe that would have helped with this and a famicom adapter which will let us use this in this as well so if you're not familiar famicom and NES slots differ fairly considerably famicom is significantly shorter the cartridge itself inside of this is actually probably the same size as the famicom version they just made them this big so that they could slide in and out of this much more easily let's take a look at the famicom adapter and see how that works because as it stands foreign that's fairly robust okay is this 3D printed it's a pretty high quality print if so so I guess this would go something like this and then we would slot uh the other way huh okay the other way so I got it wrong the first time around it instead slots in like that this will work on the uh actual NES as well but this particular adapter is not really suitable for that because it won't give you the ability to kind of reach in and kind of get it it'd be useful for a top loader which is what this is cartridge latch I have no idea what this what this would be what is what I think I see you ready for this that makes a lot easier to get your game out rather than just like like you can't can't just do this anyway how about we finally plug it in and turn it on power it on see what comes up is it going to be stretched is it going to be weird no it's Super Mario Brothers 3. what you are seeing right now is actually a fairly good quality output composite video isn't known for its sharpness but this isn't terrible I kind of expected worse oh the Koopas there are not doing so hot that's kind of what I was expecting but that means that the circuitry in this is actually fairly robust in terms of cleaning and filtering the output signal making sure there's no interference that kind of thing okay let's play okay input lag is well I mean it's it's original Hardware input lag should be nothing I pre-compensated there for a jump that I thought was going to take a little bit longer for to register but it's instantaneous the d-pad feels a little bit slippery 8-bit token yeah maybe I'll switch out to the 8-Bit doe controller see if the controller port in the front here has enough power to handle a Bluetooth transmitter all right let's switch the controller out it's not quite original style it's fairly close actually it looks like it's pre-yellowed it's like the same color as the other one oh right I think this is a thing that can happen on real Hardware too well if I say real Hardware the original Hardware if you plug in something that's power Hungry Like the Bluetooth dongle here it'll reset the console uh the 8-Bit drill controller this feels a lot stiffer yeah this feels really tight this d-pad's a lot better well it's a lot firmer if it's more defined the other controller is d-pad was worn in let's just put it that way after getting past or I guess through the first level the audio sounds pretty good I can't turn it up unfortunately this monitor doesn't have a volume control for some reason but it sounds pretty good I don't hear any like buzzing or anything like that no there's not even any levels coming through right now on this pause screen which is something that would never be the case on my RF NES now composite video on its own it's going to have some problems this is probably the best case scenario for like upscaling it with the Retro tank 5x Pro here which itself could probably do for another review because this thing has been updated significantly honestly this is a really clean composite output If This Were plugged into a CRT I don't think you would really notice any composite artifacts at all like the floor there not quite where the status area is that glitching is actually normal but you can see there's a little bit of like fuzz going on down there but it's not as bad as I would expect you know what was bad though back in the day to my recollection was Mega Man so let's throw that on and see what sound oh well that just comes right on so yeah you can see the the kind of fringing between the the white and the red on the three there and also in the logo up there there's a little bit of like fuzzy flickering that flickering is also normal for this game the Robot Masters look pretty good here I remember a lot more fringing around the uh the stage select um like the borders there yeah I mean it looks it sounds great I mean obviously it's original Hardware so it's going to uh I don't know if Super Mario USA has expansion audio or not but I'll throw that in real quick just to kind of test it and then we'll take it apart is it just me or is like the composite artifacts way worse on this I usually don't play Mario in this game how about I take it apart they thankfully include a nice little allen wrench and I think yeah they have points here that tell you how to get it open it's the right size all right cool that that's it this right here is the original NES picture processing unit this right here is the original NES CPU yeah they're both socketed so if I wanted to I could pry up the picture processing unit and replace it with an RGB one and I think you can also get a replacement rear module here that gives you RGB output so if that was a thing you wanted if you didn't want all those composite artifacts I was talking about then you can do that and more of that white plastic in here I don't know if you can see that but there's little tabs in here that are kind of you can push them inside so it kind of grips the cartridges a little bit better yeah they get pushed out otherwise the cartridge was just kind of like plop on there and kind of do that and yeah on the PCB it's got carte blank side and cart label side what are these switches for are these overclocking switches yeah ntsc and pal so I could switch it over to the European Standard for video I think I would need a different PPU for that though now I mentioned these chips are socketed on an original console they probably wouldn't be I don't think they would be at all and the reason being they were specific usually to each region or console production run but they wouldn't have been interchangeable Because the actual board layout would have changed slightly to support that other Processing Unit so in this case that's what those switches are for so if I were to pop out there we go that there is a Nintendo CPU well that was a lot easier to take apart than it was to put back together if you wanted to go with clone Hardware so not an original NES then you're looking at 209 US Dollars which is steep for the proper Hardware you're looking at 229 and that's for the unit you're looking at right here with that in mind would I recommend it I think as a kit like a hobbyist kit it might be a lot of fun for somebody who wants to you know get their hands dirty with you know soldering and socketing chips and that kind of thing for like intermediate users that might be a uh a value add in terms of just playing your games I don't think this is really the best way to do it granted it is very small and it's very convenient like to put on your shelf compared to uh like any of this stuff we didn't have a place to put it the NES is on the floor all the components except for the CPU and PPU if at least for the original ones those will be brand new and it's powered with USB type c which is super great especially considering the NES uses nine-fold AC just ridiculous for all but the most hardcore like Nintendo retro enthusiasts I I don't think I would recommend it for that much money especially when you can get a Raspberry Pi if you really wanted to or like you can get a fairly Baseline Mister setup for that and I guess that's really it honestly really nice looking but I don't think I could recommend it for any practical purpose but I can recommend short circuit for you we have plenty more like this one and unlike it as well so get subscribedit's retro time and this is an NES a North American Nintendo if you will the Nintendo Entertainment System this is rather large for what you might consider to be a rather old and not very powerful piece of Hardware but this was expandable that was the big thing like you could use custom chips to make sure that your games would run whatever you wanted them to run basically it kind of reinvigorated the video game Market in the west so much so that if Atari hadn't died they would have licensed to this as the AVS but Nintendo came back and they gave us this today this is well I mean you can you can tell the shell that has yellowed quite a bit like that's that's real Hollow right and it's it's kind of pointless so um there's this project called tininess and what that does is it just kind of condenses everything you know makes it more I mean compact like the box for this is actually smaller physically than the NES itself so let's put this to the side here and have a look at this we've got kind of a preview on the box here as to how big the actual console is it's not the size of the Box on the side here we've got kind of sort of public domain it's not quite this is a fairly permissive license you can I think build this yourself it's not open source though made by tall Dog Electronics which I think is that a main wolf don't know a tinyness tinyness genuine okay this is where we need to talk about what the tininess is the tininess isn't a modern Recreation of the console it's literally the guts from this shrunk down into this the way they're able to do that is by harvesting chips out of those old consoles or in the case of the non-genuine version there are actually clone chips you can get that are completely I think they still make them or at least they're still available they're not great in terms of compatibility I think and some graphical glitches can happen but you can still build one of these completely from scratch without any official Nintendo components which is just great and on the back here we get another preview of what it looks like this time in 3D instruction manual of some kind so it's powered by a 5 volt DC which enters the USBC Jack on the rear of the console okay so I will need a USBC power supply okay yep they have a provided USBC power adapter and black and gold usb-c cable you know what I'm just going to not read this any further because it seems like something I could just find out by unboxing it and that's a lot more interesting isn't it let's just pull this out of here and is this an actually just an apple USBC adapter it's got an apple model number on it either that or it's a clone it doesn't feel like it's lightweight or anything so it's probably legit or legit enough for our purposes anyway that's pretty adorable so I guess this uses a trrs connector here to split off into the RCA outputs yeah this doesn't have HDMI or anything fancy like that it's just the original type of outputs that you would have gotten on the NES itself unless you were like me back in the day and you used this which is even worse let's see we've got a tall dog sticker and an allen wrench I guess they intend you to open it up which is great because I'm going to do that and here is the console itself that actually looks really sharp and it's so tiny like okay it's a little bit shorter in this Dimension than an NES cartridge okay a little bit wider and yeah a little bit thicker as well games I suppose just go in like that with the label facing that way oh that's interesting there's actually already RCA jacks on the back of this so apparently the this connector here that goes in here splits out all of the individual audio channels so if you've got expansion audio in your Japanese famicom game then you can get that and mix it separately from the built-in audio so I guess if your game is too loud on the expansion audio which is the thing that can happen you can kind of mix it separately or you can just mix it the way you want to interesting I'm not sure why also apparently this can be configured for RGB output and I'm not sure how you would do that exactly remember what I said the license for this thing was pretty permissive well here is the block diagram of the whole console it's just right there find all the components and you can put them together in the same way that the console is put together which is pretty sick they even have the bill of materials here and according to this you can install an RGB capable picture Processing Unit or PPU the original NES didn't actually have RGB output in the traditional sense it's PPU basically just spat out more or less composite video which has been an issue for a while because if you've ever noticed that like emulators and Wii virtual console and everything thing else seems to have different colors that's why what colors you were supposed to get out of the NES were not really set in stone they varied from console to console basically back to the console itself we do have our video we've got the reset button back here which is kind of an interesting place to put it because some games kind of relied on the reset button on and off switch back here that works it's kind of sharp I would have preferred maybe a larger switch but it is powered with type c on the front we've got traditional NES controller ports so I can plug in my traditional controller my NES advantage or if I had a CRT to plug this into my zapper I don't have one of those here today though and on the other side there's nothing oh right there is one more thing and that's this little dial down here it's a potentiometer that is what you would use to adjust the levels of the balance of the the internal audio and the expansion audio like I was explaining earlier in case you're only using the onboard output and that's basically it this thing is super basic aside from that we've got some I guess nice looking but basic cables for uh audio video that's literally all you get if you got your your mono channel for audio and you've got your video and we've got this nice uh USB type-c cable they're all braided which is nice I'll get these out of here and we'll power it on but first i'm going to talk to you about our sponsor vesi thanks to vesi for sponsoring today's video soggy sock season is upon us which means smelly foot season is also upon us and it's time to put those boat shoes back on the Shelf vesi makes water resistant sneakers that offer you reassurance when the weather report simply can't and trust me right now uh in Vancouver it really can't their Diamond text material will keep you warm in the winter good thing and cool in the summer also a good thing because then you have sweaty feet right they're comfy breathable and lightweight they're also 100 cruelty free and vegan down to the glue they use keep your feet dry and save 25 with offer code short circuit at vessey.com Short Circuit now before we get into this I got a Game Genie here yep okay sure that's that's not weird oh oh oh oh oh that's a tight fit oh okay so one thing you might have noticed is that took quite a bit of effort to get in and out in contrast the original NES a lot easier all right let's power this thing up uh you got me a monitor I was just setting up to well set this up when I realized that we have some more boxes here we have a cartridge latch not sure what that's about maybe that would have helped with this and a famicom adapter which will let us use this in this as well so if you're not familiar famicom and NES slots differ fairly considerably famicom is significantly shorter the cartridge itself inside of this is actually probably the same size as the famicom version they just made them this big so that they could slide in and out of this much more easily let's take a look at the famicom adapter and see how that works because as it stands foreign that's fairly robust okay is this 3D printed it's a pretty high quality print if so so I guess this would go something like this and then we would slot uh the other way huh okay the other way so I got it wrong the first time around it instead slots in like that this will work on the uh actual NES as well but this particular adapter is not really suitable for that because it won't give you the ability to kind of reach in and kind of get it it'd be useful for a top loader which is what this is cartridge latch I have no idea what this what this would be what is what I think I see you ready for this that makes a lot easier to get your game out rather than just like like you can't can't just do this anyway how about we finally plug it in and turn it on power it on see what comes up is it going to be stretched is it going to be weird no it's Super Mario Brothers 3. what you are seeing right now is actually a fairly good quality output composite video isn't known for its sharpness but this isn't terrible I kind of expected worse oh the Koopas there are not doing so hot that's kind of what I was expecting but that means that the circuitry in this is actually fairly robust in terms of cleaning and filtering the output signal making sure there's no interference that kind of thing okay let's play okay input lag is well I mean it's it's original Hardware input lag should be nothing I pre-compensated there for a jump that I thought was going to take a little bit longer for to register but it's instantaneous the d-pad feels a little bit slippery 8-bit token yeah maybe I'll switch out to the 8-Bit doe controller see if the controller port in the front here has enough power to handle a Bluetooth transmitter all right let's switch the controller out it's not quite original style it's fairly close actually it looks like it's pre-yellowed it's like the same color as the other one oh right I think this is a thing that can happen on real Hardware too well if I say real Hardware the original Hardware if you plug in something that's power Hungry Like the Bluetooth dongle here it'll reset the console uh the 8-Bit drill controller this feels a lot stiffer yeah this feels really tight this d-pad's a lot better well it's a lot firmer if it's more defined the other controller is d-pad was worn in let's just put it that way after getting past or I guess through the first level the audio sounds pretty good I can't turn it up unfortunately this monitor doesn't have a volume control for some reason but it sounds pretty good I don't hear any like buzzing or anything like that no there's not even any levels coming through right now on this pause screen which is something that would never be the case on my RF NES now composite video on its own it's going to have some problems this is probably the best case scenario for like upscaling it with the Retro tank 5x Pro here which itself could probably do for another review because this thing has been updated significantly honestly this is a really clean composite output If This Were plugged into a CRT I don't think you would really notice any composite artifacts at all like the floor there not quite where the status area is that glitching is actually normal but you can see there's a little bit of like fuzz going on down there but it's not as bad as I would expect you know what was bad though back in the day to my recollection was Mega Man so let's throw that on and see what sound oh well that just comes right on so yeah you can see the the kind of fringing between the the white and the red on the three there and also in the logo up there there's a little bit of like fuzzy flickering that flickering is also normal for this game the Robot Masters look pretty good here I remember a lot more fringing around the uh the stage select um like the borders there yeah I mean it looks it sounds great I mean obviously it's original Hardware so it's going to uh I don't know if Super Mario USA has expansion audio or not but I'll throw that in real quick just to kind of test it and then we'll take it apart is it just me or is like the composite artifacts way worse on this I usually don't play Mario in this game how about I take it apart they thankfully include a nice little allen wrench and I think yeah they have points here that tell you how to get it open it's the right size all right cool that that's it this right here is the original NES picture processing unit this right here is the original NES CPU yeah they're both socketed so if I wanted to I could pry up the picture processing unit and replace it with an RGB one and I think you can also get a replacement rear module here that gives you RGB output so if that was a thing you wanted if you didn't want all those composite artifacts I was talking about then you can do that and more of that white plastic in here I don't know if you can see that but there's little tabs in here that are kind of you can push them inside so it kind of grips the cartridges a little bit better yeah they get pushed out otherwise the cartridge was just kind of like plop on there and kind of do that and yeah on the PCB it's got carte blank side and cart label side what are these switches for are these overclocking switches yeah ntsc and pal so I could switch it over to the European Standard for video I think I would need a different PPU for that though now I mentioned these chips are socketed on an original console they probably wouldn't be I don't think they would be at all and the reason being they were specific usually to each region or console production run but they wouldn't have been interchangeable Because the actual board layout would have changed slightly to support that other Processing Unit so in this case that's what those switches are for so if I were to pop out there we go that there is a Nintendo CPU well that was a lot easier to take apart than it was to put back together if you wanted to go with clone Hardware so not an original NES then you're looking at 209 US Dollars which is steep for the proper Hardware you're looking at 229 and that's for the unit you're looking at right here with that in mind would I recommend it I think as a kit like a hobbyist kit it might be a lot of fun for somebody who wants to you know get their hands dirty with you know soldering and socketing chips and that kind of thing for like intermediate users that might be a uh a value add in terms of just playing your games I don't think this is really the best way to do it granted it is very small and it's very convenient like to put on your shelf compared to uh like any of this stuff we didn't have a place to put it the NES is on the floor all the components except for the CPU and PPU if at least for the original ones those will be brand new and it's powered with USB type c which is super great especially considering the NES uses nine-fold AC just ridiculous for all but the most hardcore like Nintendo retro enthusiasts I I don't think I would recommend it for that much money especially when you can get a Raspberry Pi if you really wanted to or like you can get a fairly Baseline Mister setup for that and I guess that's really it honestly really nice looking but I don't think I could recommend it for any practical purpose but I can recommend short circuit for you we have plenty more like this one and unlike it as well so get subscribed\n"