Soon, Dead SNES Consoles Will Be Resurrected By FPGA Technology

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As we so often like to inform you, all of your vintage gaming hardware is slowly but surely shuffling towards the grave.

As the old saying goes, everything put together falls apart, and systems like the SNES are now operating way beyond their intended lifespan. Sooner or later, things are going to fail (or, in the case of Nintendo's 16-bit system, speed up), and the CPU is one such component.

In fact, it's one of the hardest parts of the console to replace—it's not like you can ring up Rioch and order another 5A22. That's the dilemma that was faced by [leonllr] when they picked up a second-hand SNES and found that its CPU was faulty.

Finding a replacement was expensive, and [leonllr] didn't want one sourced from a perfectly good console, so the decision was made to build a replacement (thanks, Hackaday).

Here's what the developer had to say about the origins of the project:

A few weeks ago, I purchased my very own SNES console (as I've long been interested in the internal working of retro consoles), but sadly it was struck by the curse of a defectuous S-CPU revision A.

But when I searched for a replacement, the cheapest I could see was 50CHF (about 50$), and even then it's ripped away from a probably perfectly lively console.

So then I decided that I was going to try to fix that, using a FPGA.

Costing just $20, the ICE40HX8K FPGA is the perfect replacement for the existing CPU, and [leonllr] has even gone as far as to develop an installation method to fit the chip to a real SNES console. It runs a core which has been spun off from the SNESTANG project.

[leonllr]'s solution will ensure that SNES consoles are easy to repair moving forward and should ensure that the system's legacy extends even further into the future. The mod is entering its final stage, and testing will begin shortly. It is expected to cost around $45 to $55, and if you want one, you can register your interest here.