The world’s smallest Nintendo 64 fits in your pocket

At the end of the year, if you have a craze to suddenly re-examine the Zelda Ocarina of time, why not do it on a small Nintendo 64? A skilled hacker has created a smaller and smaller version of the popular console.

By the end of 2020, this is not just for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X: older consoles are also entitled to their quarter-hour glory. Launched in France in 1997, the Nintendo 64 is a second-generation hacker thanks to the relentless hacker’s ability to turn a cartridge console into a compact little accessory.

This achievement is not much to play Nintendo 64 games on a small device (many emulators do this even better on mobile), but it is almost time to use only the official components to achieve this result. The portable console is a cartridge reader with an actual Nintendo 64 and a total thickness of less than 5 cm. A little miracle of welds and upgrades. Unfortunately, with the approval of ConMots (YouTube on the back of the video), the mini console is not very comfortable: the battery does not last more than an hour and a half, and the 3’s screen, 5 inches, only shows a definition of 320 x 240 pixels.

Game Bigger than the cartridge

However, it is still an achievement to integrate all the functions of the famous home console into a subset smaller than the controller of the time. To achieve this, Conmots cut out the original printed circuit board and then rearranged the various components to fit everything about 8 cm by 8.5 cm (not counting the cartridge reader) into a 3D shell. RAM space is rotated 90 ated and the dedicated control interface chip is placed in one corner of the PCB. This set has a total of 270 mm.³.

However, if the printed circuit is original, not all controllers are. All the buttons on the popular trident controller are present, but some, such as the directional cross and C buttons, have been replaced by Nintendo switch sticks. Since the printed circuit board does not breathe better than the original console, all are encased in a 3D printed shell designed to withstand heat. The whole thing may be bad and power hungry, but the making of the Nintendo 64 was much bigger than the gaming bullets of that time.