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elow are pictures of various hardware projects I have stuck together.

Dance Dance Gaiden

After stumbling on the RTS752 chip in a third party controller, I decided to patch a Dance Dance Revolution mat into my Super Nintendo.

Why would anyone want to wire a dancing mat into their Super Nintendo? Because beating Ninja Gaiden with my fingers was too easy.

Sadly, the controls were quite terrible, and the game became devastatingly difficult after Act 4-2. The pad wasn’t very effective for Street Fighter II either, or really anything else on the system.

But hey, it made for some cool pictures!

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Genesis Stick on Super Nintendo

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System never had an arcade controller worth the plastic it was molded from. Even the CAPCOM fighter stick was quite inferior. The Sega Genesis, however, had a great fighter stick.

I cannibalized a third-party Super Nintendo controller and used its main board as a pass-through board. The copper treads on the Genesis board were severed and spliced down wrapping wire and into the Super Nintendo one, which also had its buttons severed.

The controller worked incredibly well and demonstrated no noticeable lag or wrong presses, so I assume cross talk is not an issue with such a low-voltage device.

Adding insult to injury, I used my new Sega stick to play Super Mario Bros. All-Stars.

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Shadow PSX

These pictures are really terrible. They were taken with my brother’s micro-Poloroid back in 1999. Sadly, since the unit is long dead, I cannot take any new ones.

This is the result of out-of-control PlayStation modding when you are a Radio Shack employee with boundless access to parts.

I added an internal memory card mounted through the case lid. It was mapped to Port 2 with a toggle switch so you could disable it and use an external card in its place. With the card enabled, you could still access a GameShark card, which allowed you to share the port with both the memory card and the Shark.

Like all hardware mods we did at the Shack, I stuck a blue LED in place of the system’s normal one. The serial port was cannibalized and a slave cable was hard-wired in to connect to my PC.

The internal laser was powered up to support CD-RWs, and a toggle switch was added to flip between CD/R and CD-RW voltages. Next up, I tore apart the CD assembly and rebuilt it with metal treads harvested from the sliding cover of a 3.5-inch floppy disk — a great trick I learned from my coworker Jason.

Sadly, the machine was so wrecked by virtue of being an SCPH-1001 model that it only played vertically. One of the pictures shows my machine booting the Rurouni Kenshin RPG.

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