Modding a NES to have an inbuilt game genie

I was getting tired of the worn zero force insertion cartridge slot never seating properly on my old NES. I also quite like using the game genie on insanely hard games like Contra to give myself more lives and such. So, I thought that It might be a good idea to steal the cartridge connector from the game genie and solder onto a simple circuit board for mounting purposes, then mount onto the pivoting cartridge mechanism. This way the NES will still feel like the genuine article as you can still press the cartridge down. It took an awful lot of soldering of ribbon cable and some aluminium tape for RF shielding, but all in all a very simple yet tedious process, there is even plenty of space to fold the game genie back onto the motherboard, the result is a NES that automatically boots to game genie.

I took a few snap shots along the way.

 

It looks bada$$, nice. Contra is a game that is mandatory game genie, are you gonna mod it further, maybe rgb?

 

Never thought about doing a game genie hardmod install into a nes. nice idea.

interesting comment since I don't even use the 30 lives code to finish contra.

 

Nice mod. Add in a NES RGB board, expansion audio (for PowerPak or Everdrive N8), dual mono or true stereo mod, and it will be perfect.

 

try finishing alien wars without a game genie

 

I've always imagined that... Good work! (could do some cleaning on the soldering too...)

 

Ah, I'm tempted by the RGB expansion board but here is Australia there were never many sets that supported SCART or RGB so I would have to put a small RGB to YPBPR converter in there as well If I could get my hands on an RGB expansion board cheaply enough I'd do it in a heartbeat

 

You are right about the soldering being a bit daggy, I had to strip and tin every single wire in the ribbon I needed a way to save time and prevent stray strands of the wire bridging the tracks. So instead of twisting every single strand and tinning it the conventional way, I would swipe my iron along the bare wire to tin it, the only problem with this system being that the wires want to spread out and separate when being soldered. To get around this I loaded up my solder pads with copious amounts of solder, heated it with the iron, and pushed the tinned wire into it. This was just a late night proof of concept project that I rushed into without too much planning.
If I were to do this project again I would use edge mounted IDC headers and make it a very tidy job, they can be bought in various sizes at radio shack or jaycar quite cheaply, you would probably need to use a 36 pin and a 40 pin side by side and trim the edges of the sockets where they meet. I might actually do this if I take the NES apart again to do an RGB mod.





These being the style of socket and connector that I would use.

 

Damn for real people need more than 30 lives to finish the game? I finish the game with the default 3 lives, super c is more challenging but is not unforgiving.
Nice mod by the way, very clean.

 

I have been meaning to do this with a N64 for a little while. Glad to see someone had the same idea! Nice work and I might use the IDC connector idea in the future.

 

I've done it. I also don't even use the Konami code for Contra or Super C. :/

 

By having the Game Genie always there, certain games like Mega Man 2 will never sound correct. The Game Genie writes certain sound registers and never resets them to their power on values. Apparently this is why certain games end up with funky sounding music and sound effects. The reason being that the games themselves never modify these settings themselves. And apparently the power on values are consistent.