Looking at my consoles after having moved, I was thinking about ways to get a very clean setup. Having to use multiple wall wart power supplies of fixed length has always been a royal pain in the ass that always ends up giving poor results. This got me thinking. As a life long guitar player, I've seen countless devices like this used for pedal boards to avoid what is more or less the same issue. What are some of the hurdles that would be involved in creating something like this for our console set ups? Something like this would allow us to have a single device that lives in the cabinet and plugs into our power strips, while allowing smaller custom length breakout cables to be routed in a bus like fashion to each of the consoles that use barrel connectors (so no N64)
Retro consoles use different power ports, also depending on the console system you need various voltages, even negative ones. I had to work out this nightmare on my previous Project Unity system. As I remember, I had to incorporate several voltages from -5v to 16v from one 12v supply.
Compatibility with different voltages and polarities is something that pretty much every decent pedalboard supply has as a feature, so that part doesn't seem to be too crazy. I took a look at your video for Project Unity. Really cool stuff. Since you have done this before, did you notice any strange issues such as interference or any other nastiness from powering so many consoles off of the same supply, or would you say that everything seemed the same as it was when using separate supplies in separate cases? Also, aside from barrel connectors, and the two pin AC connector that the original PSX and Saturn use, what other connectors did you encounter?
I had the system so the various voltages were connected to all the systems needing them however ground only connected to the console system that was going to be used at that time, otherwise the system would have been plagued by incompatabilities and conflicts. I didn't get interference as used shielding for all the wiring. All the connections were made by soldering directly to their points rather than using plugs; however as you ask, all retro consoles apart from DreamCast and PSX (which use a kettle plug off the mains) seem to use different power port plugs, so if you wanted to make your system you'd probably be best off working out what voltages you need, have one transformer (probably 12v) and wire up the specific voltages needed per system to each system's power port so you just plug in your console to the one you need. You will need a 2nd transformer though as the SNES (wierdly) uses 9v AC not DC as input; which converts 9v AC internally to 9v DC before going to a 7805 to convert to 5v, although 7-9v is needed still on the 7805 as otherwise you don't get audio.
it shouldn't be super hard to do, you will essentially end up with a modular PSU. First decide what systems you want to plug into it, their power requirements are the focus. Ok lets say you want to run some basic retro systems, NES, SNES, Gamecube, Megadrive, Core Grafx Lets Break it down: NES/SNES : PAL units are 9V AC Gamecube: 12V DC MD/Core Grafx: 9V DC Now find a suitable power supply, I'd just go out and grab a new cheap "Quiet" PC PSU and remove the ATX loom. Throw in some modular jacks and run the green wire (PSU on) to a switch. Like So>> You could wire up voltage regulation internally for 9V and leave it plain old DC.. So you would end up with a PSU with 3V, 5V, 9V and 12V outputs. For the 9V AC junkies just use an inline DC to AC converter circuit between the PSU and console.. most consoles use barrel jacks, for odd ones like the GC and N64, sacrifice some dead or 3rd party AC adapters.. Tip if you plan on using a N64, just run 12V to the console and add a 12v to 3.3V regulator (use up some empty space in the sacrificed AC adapter and save wire [as that system requires 12v and 3.3V )
Actually, a lot of consoles run off 7v-9v quite happily. That assumes though you are happy to get under the hood, open your consoles, wire a suitable female port (to be standard) to the power lines. If you do that, you can use a PSone transformer for most of my modding, which is 7.5v at 2.5 amps. Perfectly enough, for MagaDrive, SNES (as 9v AV converts to 9v DC and that powers to a 7805 which is why 7.5v is fine), NES, TurboGrafx, PSone, Amstrad GX4000, N64 (the 12v only is used for 7805 for audio circuit, 3.3v for main system, so you'd need to wire up a regulator too), Jaguar, Atari 7800, Atari 2600 - although PS2 needs 8.5v, GameCube 12v (unless you rig up custom regulators). Issue is if you're using Intellivision, ColecoVision as they need multiple voltages and also negative too. It all depends on what you want to use as to what you need, and if you're happy to mod your systems to use a universal power plug or not.
Why mod the systems when you can supply them with what they need externally? Opening them up, drilling holes and modifying them seems like a lot of unnecessary work.. All AT power supplies and a fair few ATX power supplies include a -5V rail (Bought this thermal master model 3 days ago brand new, for my home server, so finding a PSU with -5V is not hard at all) Like I said with systems that require multiple voltages (N64), you will only need to run 12V to the system and step down to 3.3v for logic at the console (Use the shell off a dead N64 PSU, wire 12v directly in and have a 3.3v regulator off the 12v to the 3.3v pins). For something like a ColecoVision, OP could use a AT/ATX PSU (with a -5V rail), run 12v/GND/-5V to the system and step down 12v to get +5V. Three wires all external, no cutting consoles up, buy a reel of black multi-core wire (often called trailer wire, comes in 4,5 & 8 core and look nice too) and use it for everything heck you could even run stuff like an Xbox (You would need to mod this one) and Xbox 360 of this as I doubt you will power every system on at once OP wants a single PSU to run all his consoles, correct?
I actually made something for this problem a couple of years back. Here's the pictures: http://imgur.com/a/wOiwg Here's the more technical write-up on doing it yourself: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AwsX5Bhs4XyoZgdTTsOh1Ira2nIGLG_4kibsANqG8Ik/pub I partially lucked out because all of my systems I need it for will run fine off of 9V DC (NES works with AC or DC), so I didn't have to do any circuitry or devices to convert to different voltages. The only system I had an issue with was Turbo CD, which wouldn't load games without 12V (though Turbo Duo is fine with 9V).
I looked into this as well and had trouble finding something cost effective and time worthy for my systems as I grew. I settled on these rack mount psu with 9 isolated power ports. I have 3 in my current setup, all full and many with dual power splitter cables for things like Sega cd or 32 x, 360's and wifi that have external hard drives, etc.. Cost effective, isolates power, use port for headsets and other charging items, and takes minimal space. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/902300-REG/technical_pro_ps9u_rack_mount_power_supply.html
I was thinking of going that rout with my new set up as I now need over 20 outlets for all my systems :0
Wow, that is actually pretty similar to what I meant. The only difference is I want to contain the dc power supply in the case (transformer, rectifier, voltage regulation etc.) But the overall concept of a box with multiple barrel connectors and custom length plugs to the systems is spot on.
Really like this idea, may have to go hit up Fry's this weekend see if I can get all the parts to do myself. I just want to make sure I am on point for this, you handled the polarity with custom male to male connections (swapping wires) rather than wiring up half of the plugs each way?
Yes, the male to male cables going from the DC distribution box (for lack of a better name) to each console were wired appropriately for the polarity that each console needed. Every output of the DC box is the same polarity, but they'll get whatever polarity that is given by the DC power brick plugged into it Personally, I used a power brick with negative polarity since that's what most of the retro consoles used. If that power brick ever died and I ended up with a positive polarity power brick, i'd probably change it (swap the wires) to negative polarity so wouldn't have to go change all my male-to-male cables.
I've been doing a bit of research on DC power supplies in general and it seems to actually be somewhat simple. I liked the isolated concept that the pedal power I linked to above had, but I could only find this transformer http://www.tedweber.com/wpdlxfmr-2 for something like that. The problem with it is that each 11VAC secondary can only support a 300mA draw, so it wouldn't be enough for most systems. If I could source out a transformer with a 120 VAC primary and multiple 12 or 11 VAC secondaries that can handle higher amperage then I can pull this off the way that I wanted to. If not, The only other way I could see is using a bunch of individual transformers that have 1 12 or 11 VAC secondary and wire all the primaries in parallel off the 120VAC input, then doing the same thing I would do with the single primary/multi secondary transformer (rectifify, smooth, and regulate each secondary) to the secondary of each individual transformer. If anybody knows a good power transformer supplier where I might be able to get this in a single package, please post a link here.
[Edited because source listed did not work out] I have found that one can get custom toroidal transformers made as one offs for somewhat reasonable prices. I think I'm going to request some quotes and see what I can come up with. Does anybody have a list of power requirements for all the common, and even some less common, consoles? I'm pretty interested in making this happen so any resource suggestions, even if they don't turn out to be what I need, are greatly appreciated.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO DON'T DO IT! Just having a bare transformer won't help you, yes it may put out the desired voltage but won't have any smoothing, regulation or safety features.... Save yourself the money and get a decent switching PSU, like a PC PSU or even a constant current supply usually used for LED lighting.. If you are worried about noise just add extra smoothing to the output.. This isn't 1965
Please read my whole post as I clearly mentioned that. It still all STARTS with getting the right transformer to provide me with isolated stepped down AC voltages.
I have a 500 Watt PC PSU just sitting here that I'm probably going to convert into a bench supply. I don't want that for this purpose. The whole point is for each line to be isolated, and in a different form factor than and ATX PSU. I'm also going to take the experience I get from this and apply it to my custom MIDI switching rig as that needs a 9V supply (although that won't need multiple isolated taps so sourcing the transformer will be a lot easier). It's meant to be a custom solution. Just like they already make SCART switching units, we have superG making his own that are specially built for this RGB gaming purposes. This is to be specially designed to be a clean linear power supply hub for multiple consoles. No more, no less. I encounter this mentality a lot in programming (which is what I do for a living.) "Somebody wrote a library that has this in it. Why are you writing your own functions?" Great! But it's also bloated with a million other things that I don't need and I've got to spend the time learning somebody else's implementation and shoehorning it into what I'm trying to do, which might not be better for my purposes than what I would come up with on my own. At the same time, when I take the "There's a library for that" approach, I don't learn anything, or at the very least not nearly as much as I would have had I taken the time to actually figure out what is going on. The learning experience is as much a part of it as the end result. Furthering my skills so that I can apply them in other areas of interest and other projects.
