NES Mini ITX

A huge part of the charade here is making the connectors for the keyboard and mouse plug into the NES controller ports. I bought two controllers and found an old keyboard and mouse, and combined the two.

This is the mouse I decided to use, mostly because I like scroll wheels and it was sitting around looking lonely.

I took these wires off of the controllers I bought. I had originally intended to just cut the wires off, but when I saw those spiffy black sleeve things on them where they went into the controllers, I knew I had to keep those. So I opened the controller and unsoldered the wires from the board. There are five wires, which is just what I need for my PS2 mouse and keyboard.

Obviously, no project like this can be complete without disassembling everything first. This is the keyboard undergoing the initial stages of surgery.

The mouse underwent similar treatment, but it made more pieces when I was done. And I almost lost one of the little silver springs that sits under the scroll wheel.

I was too lazy to take pictures of the process, but here is the result. The black coating on my solder joints is a black liquid electrical tape that I bought from Home Depot because it looked neat. The stuff is hard to work with, because it drips a lot, but if you let it dry and put two coats on, it looks really good. When I matched the wires up, I used whatever colors were closest to each other (red = orange, blue = blue, etc.).

And this is what the finished mouse looks like.

I still have to make the extensions that connect the other side of the controller ports to the PS2 connectors on the back of the motherboard. However, I cannot do that until almost everything else is done, because the motherboard has to be mounted for me to get the right wire paths and lengths. I will update this page when that happens.

Part	Price
NES	$5
Motherboard	$100
USB NIC	$19
Shipping	$9
Controllers	$14
TOTAL	$147