NES Hacks

I have always been a fan of the good ol' Nintendo entertainment system. That being said, I enjoy a good challenge. I was surfing the internet when I came across a viral video for a Mario hack that was intended to be comparatively difficult to the original Super Mario Bros. game. I downloaded the hack, but playing it on a computer didn't have the same nostalgic feeling as playing it on a real console.

A video of the hack:


I decided to take up the challenge and port this hack for play on a real Nintendo console.

The first challenge was finding a suitable donor cart. After acquiring an obscure screwdriver bit, I opened a lot of potential donor carts (the modified board is also in this shot):

I determined that a game entitled "Excitebike" shared the same circuit board as the original Super Mario Bros. game's circuit board.

I purchased an eprom burner as well as several eproms off eBay. Using a piece of command-line software called ucon64, I split the hack's header into a CHR file and PRG file. I proceeded to each file to an eprom.


I desoldered the chips from the original circuitboard, and replaced them with the hack's eproms.


After I returned the game to its original casing, I popped it into my good ol' Nintendo. Success!

The game was fun to play, and the experience was well worth it.