Project Advantage (image heavy)

[Osgeld]

Project Advantage:

 

Goal: Shove a famiclone into a NES Advantage while also improving the action of the Advantage.

 

On a trip to the Goodwill store near my work I found a POWER JOY III, NES / Famicom TV plug n play emulator, along with another SUPER JOY. After digging though the power supply bin I found AC adapters for both and scurried home. The SUPER JOY was DOA, it booted but was corrupt. The POWER JOY III however fired right up with its "76000" in one ROM with a little wiggling of its RCA jacks (cracked solder lifted copper) .

 

What struck me about the thing was the controller portion was crap. Sure who knows how many years of abuse mixed in with the mandatory Goodwill policy of dumping everything into a cement mixer filled with water and old shop dirt caused this, but the whole unit was uncomfortable to play, and responded with mental measurable milliseconds worth of delay.

 

Considering that the 76 ish games (modded 1000x ways getting you a BS 76000games) are mostly arcade style titles(Kung-Fu, Pacman, Galaxian) mixed in with stuff like SMB, Contra, Sports titles and Asian titles, I thought an arcade stick would be in order. And what is the one major arcade stick for NES? yup the NES advantage.

 

I ordered one online from a game dealer (not by name cause my experience was neither horrid or great) for 6 bucks + postage, when I got it it was marked "tested" but it was funky with a extra ky. It's an old Advantage with yellow stripes where the cord was wrapped around it for decades, and at best got a surface wipedown with some mild cleaner. Three of the rubber feet were squished off position with a nice one inch slug trail of cat/dog hair and dust encrusted snot, foot number four was MIA

 

Before I tore into the joystick I inspected the mechanics of the thing, I never owned a NES during its hey-day, and all I remember about the advantage was it was a ball of wire sitting off to the side never to be used. I inspected the mechanics of the thing and noticed it had over an inch of joystick throw, and darn near a quarter inch of button depression, and if not struck dead center they would get stuck ... normal complaints of the unit. I decided to see if I could improve its action.

 

I quickly disassembled it and tossed it's dirty plastics in the kitchen sink with mild dish detergent and hot tap water for a good soak and light scrub.

 

Meanwhile my focus turned to the joystick, since it had brass inserts I did not want to toss it in a bath, and opted to clean it with a qtip and some isopropyl.

 

I thought some clickyness would be in order, but, there is no room for proper clicky switches, Instead I took some though hole tactile switches , cut two leads off, and flattened the other two . I then scrapped off the solder mask to the leads going to the original contact pads, its very simple, there is one for each direction and all are linked by a common ground.

 

Since the switches are only held down by two out of four anchor points, I also dabbed some rubber cement under the switches, strong and sturdy, it will also come off cleanly if a reverse decision is made. The problem I see here is leverage, squash down too hard and crush a switch since you can't feel them actuating . On the plus side the joystick throw is less than an half inch giving quick and accurate movement!

 

Moving on to the B and A buttons a similar process is done, this time using surface mount tactile switches, they just barely fit onto the scrapped off solder mask, but all four contact points are soldered to the PCB, and if a reverse decision was made, they can be removed.

 

When test fitting the button PCB, things were just a shade too tight, upon screwing the PCB back down to its case the big orange plastic buttons would depress the tactile switches leaving them in a permanent state of "down" . In order to solve this I looked at the plastic buttons and noticed the center plunger part was too tall. I simply (ha) drilled down 42 mil (0.042 inches) below the outer collar of the button.

 

The first button came out 100% perfect this leaves the button at its original stance with less than 1/32nd of an inch depression action, the second button I drilled too far. That sucked cause one was higher than the other (I have access to a precision mill, choose to hand drill it with a black n decker in order to save a couple days ). In the end I drilled down to 55 mil and cut off the outer collars with a xacto razor saw, which leaves the buttons all floppy if you flip the unit upside down but otherwise works just fine.

 

The final mod to the NES Advantage PCB is to replace its standard brightness red LED's with some obnoxious blue ones, whats a mod without obnoxious blue LED's?? So I popped in a couple Cree neon blue LED intended for outdoor sign usage, the original LED's are 3mm with a 2mm diameter light pipe built in, pretty standard stuff if you know what you are looking for, so its reversible.

 

MORE TO COME

Edited June 1, 2013 by Osgeld

[+GoldenWheels]

As a fan of plug n plays of all sorts...this is a very nice idea/project! It certainly would be nice to have a PNP that doesn't look like...utter shit.

[+Gemintronic]

The SuperJoy III has controller ports and a cart slot. If I had your kind of skills I'd make a stand-alone unit that still runs on batteries. By god that would be cool! Of course, I'm not sure how you'd make a generic joystick port 1 so your solution will do too

[Drakon]

*bump* Great project, didn't somebody already do one of these?

[Osgeld]

guess I should finish the writeup

[Osgeld]

Part 2: Installing the famiclone into the NES ADVANTAGE

 

I originally picked up two units from the goodwill store, a superjoy and a power joy, the power joy I could not get working and I assume it needed a cart as there was no on board rom. Accounts from the interweb seem to indicate that it may or may not have a rom onboard. The superjoy III fired right up with a little bit of wiggling on the video connection.

 

The common failure point on these poorly designed things is the RCA jack solder cracking or the trace lifting ... I had both, no matter though, the powerjoy resolved that problem with a 2m long cable which broke out to a power jack, along with a video and audio jack, which I used so now I dont need to dig up cables, or worry about plugging 3 wires into the back of the NES ADVANTAGE.

 

Opening up the superjoy 3 I was greeted with two main PCB's (and a third holding the 9 pin player 2 port). The first PCB was the main board, containing the NOAC, ROM, power regulation, and a Famicom cart port. The second board contained the controller contact pads, a chip-on-board bonded shift register that behaved exactly like what the NES uses for its controllers, and the connections to the outside world.

 

Since I do not need a dumb connector board anymore, nor a controller it was safe to remove, though the ribbon cable connecting the two boards was a bit of a mystery. Once I peeled off the hot glue support I found that whoever laid out the PCB was kind enough to label the connections on the silk screen, 9v, sound, video, reset, 5 volts out to the shift register, ground. the SPI pins were listed a little funny but with my scope it turned out to be latch, clock, data.

 

How power was being converted from 9v to 5 volts was a bit of a mistery as well until I probed it. The power joy uses a standard 3 pin 7805, this joker uses a transistor and a zener diode to regulate. The 5 volt zener diode is what actually does the regulation, but of course since its a tiny MLF part (yuck) its going to maybe handle a quarter watt of power. So what they did is attach it to a transistor's base so its not fully saturated, but not fully off, giving a roughly 5 volt reference letting all the current pass though the much stronger transistor.

 

This is pretty crappy, but its not unheard of, BUT this thing is already getting kind of hot just powering the mainboard, and now I have to power 555 timers for the ADVANTAGE's turbo and slo-mo effects + two LED's. so this was not going to do. Also the video/audio/power cable has a 0.1 pitch connector on the end so I whipped up a little board that the video cable could plug into along with a 7805 voltage regulator to handle all the load.

 

After that, there's just a couple holes to drill for reset and a power switch, wire the controller to the mainboard (both are SPI, no biggie) and attach the PCB's to the case. I used 3M double sided tape pads.. these things once bonded will be strong enough that if you wish to remove them, you might end up breaking the PCB, I have some VHB stuff that is rated to replace aluminum rivets, but that's just overkill.

 

little hot glue to tidy up the wires and bam, I am playing kung-fu!

[Jess Ragan]

I like the idea of replacing the copper traces on the board with TAC switches. The Advantage was an impressive joystick for its time, but it's hardly adequate by today's standards. The buttons are mushy, and they tend to catch around the edges of the holes they're set inside. TAC switches would go a long way toward fixing those issues. I'm just not thrilled about having to drill the buttons to such a small tolerance to make them work with the switches.

 

Also, you don't suppose a mod like this would work with the Super Advantage, do you?

[Osgeld]

the buttons were not that hard, but yet yes they were hard

 

the first one came out perfect, the second one I went one twist too far which meant it sat lower, so I had to go back and twist the first one one extra twist to keep them level, BUT now if you flip it over they flop forward and rattle ... just in-case you ever play upside down.

 

Really though this guy with a hand drill was able to hit it, the thing I dont like a bout the tact switches is that after playing a game, clicking down on those now hard buttons wears you out

 

as far as a super advantage, I dont see why not, BUT given the reason above you might want to look into cutting the rubber dome contacts up to add a little cushion for the pushin

[+GoldenWheels]

Very nice work!