Stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero into an NES cartridge for retro gaming goodness

[XAMI]

We’ve seen Raspberry Pi single-board computers used for all sorts of clever purposes but this one may be my favorite yet.

Zach from howchoo recently gutted an old NES cartridge (preferably a crappy game like Back to the Future as ruining a classic like Super Mario Bros. 3 would be blasphemy) and replaced the internals with a Raspberry Pi Zero, a USB hub (so you can play with two controllers) and a small mess of USB / adapter / extension cables.

Zach admits that it’s a rat’s nest of wires but he didn’t want to do any soldering (I can't blame him there).

With the hardware in place and secured down, Zach installed RetroPie on the computer and loaded it with 2,400 or so vintage games. He notes that everything pre-Nintendo 64 is fair play – NES, Genesis, SNES, Atari, etc. – but the Pi’s GPU simply can’t handle the N64 (nor can its bigger brother, the Raspberry Pi 3).

If you’re interested in building your own Pi Cart, Zach has posted full instructions on howchoo.