Help Ben Heck Finish His Portable N64!

The thin wires (VTerm and ground, not the data lines) connecting the resistors and caps are cancelling the ability of the caps to smooth out high frequency noise.  An oscilloscope would be very handy in this situation, but it might be more practical to have a highly stressful game (Perfect Darl/Turok II) or rendering scene run for a period of several hours - this would give an idea as to whether the RDRAM and RCP can tolerate this circuit design.

How can i check vterm?

Tomorrow ill add some original heatsinks and let it run a few hours

Nice work.

This mod essentially removes the electrical stubbing extended onto the jumper pak.  You are essentially shifting the transmission lines to a higher impedance upon termination with those wires, just like the back of the jumper-pak.  Have you verified if Vterm is properly bypassed in this setup?

I did a attempt to get the jumperpack working with 2 x 4mb ram.

this works just fine.

PAL Board

- swap the 2 x mb with 2 x 4mb

- remove the port

- cut the solder pins from the memory expension on the board, i used my soldering iron after cutting and removing the traces was easy

- wire up data lines to 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 31 to the 510 resistor packs

- wire up at least 3 caps to ground and backside to the common line of the backside of the 510's

- wire a wire from pin 3 and 17

- wire the via holes from the pins 8 and 28 to the backside common line of the 510's

- wire a wire on the back between c311 and c71

all working fine and you can add your heatsinks.

screen is black and white because i wired composite out to Green plug  on YUV port

reverence pic from modretro forum user Bentomo

Why not keep the module removable?

A lot of n64 enthusiasts have an expansion pak and the original module because some games actually work better without the expansion. Allowing it to swap out would give you options so you can play all the games in their best performance.

i had the same idea, would probably be the best solution. good shielded ones

Hey Ben I remember about 6 or 8 years ago when portableising N64 systems was the thing for a lot of forms (including your old one more or less) and that this was decided to be next to impossible to do, there were some people that have done it, but very few. I would HIGHLY recommend you attempt to get in contact with some of the experts that are still around. They can be hard to find though as a lot of the forums have disappeared and with them the users, but one of them that is still around is "Downing's Basement". He was one of the best and from what I can see he is still making portable N64 units.

Your best bet is likely to contact him through is website, and I would highly suggest that you do because he is a master when it come to this stuff. His website is downingsbasement.com he does have a contact page with his email.

I also dropped a comment on part 2 a few minutes ago, but I don't know if you will get to see it so ill drop it here because it is still relevant, but I am just going to copy it as it is almost 5AM and I need to get to sleep. Sorry.

Ahhh, is reminds me of the good old days of my ~10 year old youth when I was a member of several forums dedicated to making portable N64 systems (and most of them have disappeared off the internet at this point). There is many things that you could've used from that community, for example there is a member of one of the forums that as recent as 1 or 2 years ago was selling breakout boards for the chip on the N64 system, and oh boy NO HEATSINKS!?! That was one of the main points, you need both heatsinks and fans to keep it from overheating. Also there are things that you have done that people would of killed for back in the day, like the 3D printed mount for the game port, that was one of the hardest parts to perfect. I did some more digging and found where Downing's Basement used the breakout board ( https://downingsbasement.com/my-guides/guides/n64pkag/n64pkagp5/ ) but I know that I saw it for sale by a forum member somewhere at some point. Also if you need help or have a question I would highly urge you to get in contact with Downing's Basement, he is an amazing trove of knowledge when it comes to portable sewing N64's as he has been doing it for about 10 years now if I remember correctly,not to mention he loves helping others with N64 portablising.

could it be that the wire is adding more resistance too the line causing it too fail mabe use a lower resistance on the reisistors. outside of that i am not sure i am not too familiar with that style of memory tech

I refer you to my earlier comment.

Why don't you try making the expansion pack itself right angled and leave the standard connector?