Gold Plating The Hard Drive

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to mount the hard drive in a game cartridge and have it sit in the original NES loading bay. It needed to look great as a feature piece, it needed some bling. What better game cartridge to use then that of the gold-colored cartridge of The Legend of Zelda! Nintendo's first game to sell 1 million copies. Holding its own throughout the years, Zelda has been rated one of the best games ever to be made.

Opening of the game cartridge itself was a little interesting. Nintendo used some special screws to seal up their games for all eternity. The screws have a head on them like a reverse hex; outset instead of inset. I needed to fabricate a few tools to help me get them out. I grabbed an old flat head screwdriver and used the dremel to cut a bi of a 'V' into it. This way I could use the tips of the 'V' to grab the edges of the screws and loosen them up. To make unscrewing of the loosened screws easier, I grabbed a piece of K-Nex and melted one of its arms. Jamming the hot, bubbling plastic into the cartridge screw hole and letting it cool gave me a simple tool to use. Soon I had all the screws out.

The game board itself is larger then others I've seen. This is simply do to the fact that Zelda was one of the first games that allowed the player to save his progress. This was accomplished by an extra ROM chip and a battery, similar to the CMOS battery on a computer motherboard.

After marking out where the hard drive was to placed, I got to work with the dremel again and cut out the center screw posts on each side of the case. Then all I needed to do was cut out the plastic ridge near the opening of the cartridge. I cut it just wide enough to fit the hard drive in the center.

To make the hard drive easy to remove and yet snug when in the cartridge, I used some 3M Picture Hanging strips. They are sort of like velcro but press together instead of hook and velvet. I made sure that I put the hard drive in right side up so that I could easily remove the locking SATA cable from it if need be.

After screwing the cartridge back together it looked like the hard drive was meant to be there all along. A nice fit. I slid the cartridge into the NES loading bay and plugged in the cables.

It looked great all shiny and awesome.