Exactly what amount of money would you be willing to pay for a one-of-a-kind, custom-made Nintendo Entertainment System… PC? No, it’s not just a PC tower with an NES shell slapped on the outer plating — it’s a rewired system that actually uses the gaming system’s inputs as computer ports. Hardware wizard James Regan recently posted an extensive rundown of the project on the Retro Collect forums, describing how s/he built the entire kit.
Most notably, each socket and crevice on the NES was utilized for practical PC use. Even the front panel, normally reserved for inserting a Nintendo game (then ejecting it, blowing into the cartridge, and re-inserting it), was converted for the disc drive. Looking at the entire system, it’s hard to believe to this was Regan’s first attempt, although s/he notes that his/her entire house got destroyed in the building process.
And if you want to play some NES emulators and ROM files on this hardware with an actual gamepad, it’s as simple as plugging into the USB ports, which were re-wired into the actual controller ports — now that’s attention to detail.
Amazingly enough, Regan’s not keeping the NES PC and wants to sell it to the highest bidder. In terms of raw specs, you’re looking at an Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz dual core processor, a Samsung SN-208BB 8x DVD-RW DL & RAM SATA laptop drive, about 160 GB of storage space on a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 SATA 3GB/s hard drive, and 1GB DDR2 RAM. But can you really put a price on the innovation and nostalgia factor?
Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/248625/nes_pc_mod_combines_nintendo_power_with_computer_tech.html
