Upside Down Thinking

The motherboard in the now wrong location

After a few hours of meticulous grinding away with a dremel (around 4), I was ready to see how the motherboard would fit. Immediately I spotted a problem. As you can see, the power connector on the motherboard is located right where the NES power buttons are. The NES button module just wasn't going to fit. Not only that, the Pico PSU power connector that plugs into the motherboard sticks up a ways. It was going to interfere with the door of where the NES game cartridge is loaded. I had plans for that door. There was no way I was going to be able to fit the board the way it was; the room just wasn't there.

The NES power buttons module

This all meant a redesign, I'd have to do some upside down thinking to figure this one out. Hmmm..... Upside down. That's a great idea! I flipped the motherboard upside down and took a look.

Plenty of space for NES buttons

As you can see from this picture, there is plenty of room to fit the NES power button module. This also left enough room for the Pico PSU power adapter to now fit under the motherboard on the now opposite side. But of course this posed another problem. The RAM was sitting on the floor of the case, not ideal. Not only was it on the floor, but was sitting on the "T". This caused the whole motherboard to sit too high which resulted in the motherboard connectors also sitting partly above the top of the lower half of the NES case. I needed to make more room, this meant cutting out the "T" from the bottom of the case.

The "T" is no more

I didn't need to cut the whole "T" out. Just enough to make room for the RAM. After this "minor" adjustment (around another 2 hours), everything fit well again.

An upside down board from upside down thinking

Now that I had clearance for the board and the NES power buttons, the next step for the bottom half of the NES is to open up the back for the motherboard connectors.