You can accomplish a lot with a Dremel. For occasion, seemingly you can slim the primary NES down into the hand-held form-factor. Equally the CPU and the PPU (Photograph Processing Device) are 40-pin DIP chips, which tends to make NES minification a little bit tricky. [Redherring32] wasn’t a single to be stopped by this, having said that, and turned these DIP chips into QFN-style-mounted dies (Nitter) working with tiny more than a Dremel reducing wheel. Why? To deliver his TinyTendo handheld sport console project to fruition, of course.
DIP chip contacts go out from the die using a website of steel pins known as the leadframe. [Redherring32] cuts into that leadframe and leaves only the practical part of the chip on, with the leadframe items remaining as QFN-like get in touch with pads. Then, the chip is mounted onto a customized footprint on the TinyTendo PCB, related to all the other factors that are, fortunately, achievable to acquire in SMD kind today.
This trick functions regularly, and we’re no question going to see the TinyTendo currently being launched as a standalone job before long. Just a 12 months ago, we observed [Redherring32] lower into these chips, and wondered what the objective could’ve been. Now, we know: it’s a reasonable continuation of his OpenTendo job, a mainboard reverse-engineering and redesign of the primary NES, an energy no question appreciated by quite a few a NES fanatic out there. Ordinarily, men and women do not slice the real chips down to a modest measurement – as a substitute, they cut into the mainboards in a observe known as ‘trimming’, and this apply has brought us several miniature primary-components-based mostly activity console builds more than these a long time.
After cutting them to rough dimensions, and carefully sanding the edges to get the chips to the final proportions, they will search like this: pic.twitter.com/MTbYyHrvZ5
— Redherring32 (@redherring32) September 26, 2022