it'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
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ShortCircuit 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 ShortCircuit for you we have
plenty more like this one and unlike it as well so get subscribed