Gamer Turns a Zelda Sport & Watch Handheld right into a Retro Gaming Beast

Tito of Macho Nacho Productions takes out his trusty screwdriver and goes to work on a restricted version Zelda Sport & Watch from Nintendo that he acquired in 2020. This transportable consists of three iconic video games: the unique Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Journey of Hyperlink, and Hyperlink’s Awakening from the Sport Boy. It comes with an amazing assortment of options out of the field, together with a crisp LCD display screen, a pleasant D-pad, and separate begin and choose buttons. The battery life is sufficient, and it even has a USB-C charging connection, however Tito desires to take this machine to the subsequent stage.

First, he removes 4 screws from the again plate, disconnects the battery, after which pulls out the 2 ribbon cables that hyperlink to the LCD. The speaker desolders, giving him some freedom to function with. The motherboard is then launched by eradicating ten further screws. Tito connects an ST-Hyperlink programmer to the SWDIO, floor, and SWCLK pads as he boots up his PC and launches PowerShell as an administrator. He makes use of Chocolatey to put in Python, Pipix, OpenOCD, and G&W Supervisor from GitHub. The unlock command is executed, and the machine shows a blue display screen. Every part seems to be so as.

Tito removes the unique 16MB flash chip, which is a little bit of a bottleneck, and heats it with a scorching air station earlier than making use of flux to the pads. Tin foil and Kapton tape shield the realm to stop the neighbors from turning into too scorching, after which it comes off clear. He cleans the pads, inserts a brand new 64MB chip, and reconnects the cables. G&W Supervisor flashes some customized firmware onto the machine, which really works for a second earlier than halting at step 13. A retry resolves the difficulty, and Tito resumes enterprise.

The subsequent step is to create a customized ribbon cable by soldering a few capacitors, a resistor, and an LDO regulator on. He inserts a microSD card slot and reduces the alignment posts flat. He aligns the ribbon pins with the CPU pads, connects a wire to a capacitor, after which makes use of a rotary software to scrape off the soldermask and reveal the bottom airplane. With just a little wire and a few work, the microSD slot is absolutely operational. Tito subsequent tackles the rear shell mods, eradicating the D-pad posts, drilling 4 holes with 3D-printed jigs, and smoothing out the sides with a file to make sure every thing is sweet and flush.

With the entire mod accomplished, it’s time to launch his personal firmware. He downloads the firmware replace binary from RetroGo SD on GitHub, locations it on a FAT32 microSD card, and turns the machine on to put in it. As soon as accomplished, he restarts it and enters RetroGo – from there, it’s so simple as including some ROMs for the Sport Boy, NES, SEGA Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and different techniques. Tremendous Mario World works nicely, and Zelda: A Hyperlink to the Previous is as crisp as ever.