Help Ben Heck Finish His Portable N64!

I hear about independence.  If wiring is an issue, too large, try wires from an in ear headphones.  A set of apple ear buds should be somewhere in your shop.  They are the smallest you can get since they are tiny tiny strands that have paint shielding on each tiny strand rather then plastic shielding.

place it on they underside of the pcb

is the portable n64 going to be hdmi quality or rgb quality and will it have a deblur option?

i was going to suggest the exact same thing but you beat me to the punch

I think it is very easy for anyone to get hung up on the details of making something more portable. Mr. Heckendorn would do well to not seek perfection of portability and forsake more costly gaming systems in the process of chasing the ideal "portable" (specifically with marrying the indirect RAM extension card to port). In other words, he shouldn't use existing architecture. Fiddle around with a blank pin-out board instead of the sourced motherboards, that way further carnage is not executed up the growing death-toll.

Daniel Bautista's design is essentially the thinner mother board of the N64 with out it's plastic shell. I think this suugestionscould salvage the existing project.

As Ben Heck had observed in the first episode of this series, the Nintendo 64 was adorned with an elaborate and ornate plastic outer case that forces it to be the gaming appliance center-piece of the home. The N64 was to rest above your VCR, as if to assume an heir of privilege & place itself upon the throne of every living room as the crown jewel of any entertainment center. This engineering decision by the clowns at Nintendo forced the hand of design to borrow multi-lateral space from the top-end of the architecture.

This is a tragic dilemma for Mr. Heckendorn: On one hand there is the finite and diminishing quantity of motherboards. There are only so many Nintendo 64s that were manufactured over a five year gestation period before project dolphin (GameCube ceased productions of all N64s). The original factory stock gray cases have become the last bastion for every after-market Doctor Frankenstein hoping to jerry-rig the unit. Wanting to modify the console is totally understandable. These antiques first went on shelves last millennium during the Y2K virus patching. In other words, it is a the belief of those belonging to the millennial generation that the video games have not stood well to the test of time. Perhaps they have a point. Are we clinging onto a bastardized amalgamation of hubris? If so, how do we teach a new dog the old N64 gaming tricks that we so very nostalgically adore?

On the other hand we have the delicate nature of security lock out chips, proprietary CPU codex chips, and the risk of sending a collector's piece to the shop floor beside the rubbish bin. It is a foolish gamble to break the factory seal of any N64 in working condition. Simply because you have fabricated a novel pinball table and own a triangle-tip drill bit for backwards engineering intellectual property, does not inherently grant utmost efficacy to the home-brew bootlegger.

Philosophy and economics aside it seems to me the most compact solution (if not Daniel Bautista's clever proposition), would be to go straight back to the drawing board and ask Rasberry Pi for another product placement. You will need to have compact sim card with an emulator (the larger community will thank you for pre-installing Project64.exe) along with a USB 3c with recharging li-po battery packs. Imagine the fruits you will bear as testament to your labor (raspberry pi pun not intended )

As a fellow professional tinker that loves to restore vintage kitchen appliance to an enhanced state of their former retro glory, I do recognize and embrace the trial and error process that the Ben Heck Show broadcasts. I only feel a tinge of remorse when I consider my own carbon footprint as I outsource replacement parts.

I would recommend to check out bitbuilt.net

https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.php?threads/reverse-engineering-the-jumper-pak.896/

this is a very good guide for the expansion pack

racketboy.com • View topic - Board bending - N64 expansion pack / jumper pack
This is exactly was i proposed in the beginning of this thread...seems I got it right!

No one seems to have addressed the key electrical issue involved in designing or modding a base/concurrent RDRAM memory bus.  Controlled impedance is key, but often misunderstood with a Rambus system from the mid-90s: the impedance varies throughout the different segments of the memory bus, these different impedances must stay conserved.  Only after soldering the RDRAM ICs (capacitance) does the overall characteristic impedance drop down to 51 ohms.  Even the slightest extra solder on the RDRAM’s clock and data pins/pads is enough to cause some instability.

More specifically, the traces before and halfway underneath the RDRAM chips have a higher impedance (Rambus: loaded traces).  The wider traces that extend the memory bus and connect to the jumper/expansion slot have a lower impedance (unloaded) and function as an electrical stub.  The memory bus topology is a bit more unique on the N64: just prior to the termination resistors, the final segment of the memory bus on the back side of the jumper/expansion pack has a higher impedance.

Achieving 51 ohms by soldering through-hole components or different types of equal length wires will prove to be very difficult, but not impossible.  It would probably be easier to trim out portions of the top and bottom sides of the jumper-pak.

The jumper/expansion pak routes two 250 MHz incoming and outgoing clock signals.  When viewing the video, it seemed only the outgoing clock from the RCP is routed, the incoming clock is sourced from a clock generator on the PIF chip side of the board.

I would add that if there is too much capacitance (~33uF) on the immediate VTerm side of the termination resistors, the discharge when shutting off could damage or even destroy RCP.

yeah, indeed that's where i got it from, that's the useful info i found in it

no doubt swapping the chips and terminating resistors is the solution