My new Nintendo 64 laptop

I don’t remember what I was looking for in Google images last summer (something related to the N64), but I did find a portable N64. I was in awe and immediately started looking for a place to buy them. Unfortunately, I soon found out that you can’t just buy one of these works of art, if you want to own one, you have to make it yourself. It was in the early summer of 2009 that I began what has now become a 7-month project: porting my Nintendo 64.

Simply put, you only need three components to make an N64 Portable: the actual N64, a screen, and a battery. Oddly enough, even though you plug your regular N64 into the wall to play games, the system itself only needs around 8v to work. This makes the battery part of the project extremely easy, because almost any portable DVD player battery will do. The screen itself is really easy, because there are plenty of small screens out there that accept audio and video input, that also run at about 8v, and that’s exactly what you need!

There are plenty of other things you need to do to get a portable N64 working, but the concept itself is pretty simple. The reason I took on this project is that I love building things and I love working with electronics. I am a future engineer and I feel that this has definitely been a good project to prepare me for my future career. Admittedly, there are some wiring diagrams to be found online for this sort of thing, but the majority of this project has been completed through trial and error. And now, I’ve come so far to finally get this working and finished that I couldn’t be happier with the results.