Play anything from NES to Xbox with the Skittlespider A.T.S aka "The Contraption"

Step 8 Put it Together

There are still a few holes to drill before you can put the drill and dremel away. I had to drill four holes for buttons on my video switcher. After that, I tried to clean the inside of my monitor case. There were a lot of little bits of plastic and things like that to clean out.

Now is the moment you've been waiting for. Time to put this together.

- NES -
Installing the main board was as simple as tightening a few screws. I installed the power/reset buttons by holding it in place with some epoxy and hot glue. Then I put the controller ports stacked on top of each other and held in place by a generous amount of hot glue. I made sure the player 1 port was on top. The reason I used hot glue was that it is sturdy and flexible. That way it will stand up to some abuse from plugging and unplugging controllers.

- SNES -
This one was pretty simple. I tightened the screws to attach the main board. The power switch, reset button, and controller ports were already in place.

- N64 -
This was also pretty easy. Since the controller ports are part of the main board, all I had to do was tighten a few screws.

- PS1 -
The first thing I did was go ahead and attach the main board and power supply board with the screws. I put the controller ports in the same way as I did the NES ones, lots of hot glue.

The disk reader installation was next. My idea about the epoxy was a little tougher than I predicted, because I had to constantly spin my disk to make sure the epoxy hardened while the disk reader was in straight. For some reason, it kept trying to move around, so I had to push down pretty hard with one hand and periodically spin the disk with the other. After about half an hour, I took my hands away and flicked the disk a few times to make sure it would spin. Luckily my half hour was not wasted. It spins nicely!

Just in case, after I was finished, I applied more epoxy so that it shouldn't ever move again. This time I didn't have to help it harden in the right position.

- Gamecube -
Since I had already made the bracings and drilled the holes for the bolts, there wasn't much to do with this one. All I had to do was install it and tighten the screws. I also had to make sure those open/closed switches were pushed down.

- Xbox -
After installing the main board, I just had to install the other components. I was running low on epoxy, so I ended up using hot glue for a lot of the parts. I glued the power supply board, power/eject buttons, and the controller ports on the side. As for the cd drive and the hard drive, they were a little harder, but still pretty easy. I glued the hard drive onto the bottom of the cd drive. I then glued both of them to the back of the monitor case. Just in case, I put a small bracket in for extra support.

Now that all the systems are in place, I glued the video switcher onto the side with the buttons lining up in the middle of the holes.

(Sorry for the lack of pictures on this step, I got excited that I was almost done and forgot to stop and document what I was doing.)

Comments

[asourcelabs]

Very nice! My only suggestion for making it easier on yourself, is next time build a LINUX EMULATION SYSTEM, and include (physically) the two systems it cant emulate, the xbox and ps2. This would take up less space, and then you can use only xbox and ps2 controllers to run any of the systems (smart joy usb for the pc does this)

[skittlespider]

I'm glad you like it. I thought about emulation at one point, but I just like the actual consoles better. I'll probably try an emulator project sometime though.