Category Archives: Hobbies

NES Toploader AV Mod Index

NES Toploader AV Mod Index

  1. Disclaimer – Sorry guys, but you doing this mod is all you.  You assume all risk.  What I’m providing here is step by step instructions, lists of parts, and loads of pictures.  There is no warranty that your toploader will still work when you are done.
  2. Background – Explanation about why modding the NES toploader is desirable and a little bit of comparison between the hardware of the toaster style NES and the toploader.
  3. Preparation – Things you’ll need to do an AV Mod and where to get them.
  4. Circuit Design – An explanation of the circuit you will be building.  This post is likely more for electronics nerds than normal readers so you may be able to skip over it if you just want to get your NES modified without a lot of messing around.
  5. Circuit Construction – How to build the circuit that will be needed for the mod.  This can actually be done before you’ve even opened up your toploader.
    1. Part 1 – Putting the first few parts on the board.
    2. Part 2 – Putting some more parts on the board.
    3. Part 3 – Finishing the circuit board and putting electrical tape on the bottom.
  6. Disassembly – How to take your NES toploader apart for the AV Mod.  This is pretty easy because with this mod you don’t even need to remove the motherboard.
  7. RCA Output – This is how to modify the NES to have RCA jacks for the AV output and how to wire them.
    1. Part 1 – Build the output connection wire.  This wire gets the output of the circuit to the RCA jacks.
    2. Part 2 – Install the RCA jacks into the NES and attach the output connection wire.
  8. Motherboard Input – You’ll need power, audio, and video signals from your NES for this to work.  This is how you get them and how to remove the visual artifacts called jailbars from the output.
    1. Part 1 – Build the input connection wire.  This is how all the signals from the NES get into your circuit.
    2. Part 2 – Connect the input wire to the motherboard.
  9. Smoke Test – Before you button it all back up, it’s a good idea to make sure what you have works.
  10. Reassembly – How to hook everything together and put it all back together so you have a working NES again.
  11. Output Comparison – A bit of before and after comparison for the sake of showing how much better it really is when you’re done.

Vegetarian Chili

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Over the years I have revised my own home made vegetarian chili into an inexpensive and very delicious adventure in meatless dining.  In the beginning, I used dried beans as a base but rapidly realized that they simply aren’t worth the trouble, even if they are a little cheaper.  I also used my own blend of spices and seasonings and realized that too was a waste of time and in fact tends to increase the cost of the chili.  Here is the current incarnation of the chili.  The best it’s ever been in my opinion.  Enjoy.

Recipe:

  • 9 cans of beans.  (Any kinds you like.)
  • 2 cans of potatoes.  (I like sliced, but any will do.)
  • 2 cans of diced tomatoes.  (Unseasoned.)
  • 2 packets of chili seasoning.  (One mild and one hot.)

Preparation:

  1. Place a large pot on a large burner using an aluminum heat spreader disc in between the two.  The heat spreader disc is crucial for avoiding burning any chili to the bottom of the pot and the lack of burnt chili means nothing odd in the flavor when you are done.
  2. Dump all 13 cans of beans, potatoes, and tomatoes and both packets of seasoning into the pot unceremoniously.  For best results, you should drain the potatoes but nothing else.  This gives the chili its moisture so no water needs to be added.  In my pot once everything is in, the pot is full to within around one quarter of an inch from the top.
  3. Turn the heat up to roughly half way between low and medium on your dial, stir the contents very carefully, put the lid on the pot, and wander away.  This level of heat with the heat spreader disc in place will eventually make the chili bubble gently but never really boil.
  4. Stir every now and then.  I tend to stir about once every 30 to 45 minutes when I make it.  During your stirring be sure to rub the spoon on the bottom of the pot to ensure nothing is burning to the bottom, if you find that it is, turn it down.  If you used a heat spreader, you should be ok.  Please stir very slowly, the pot is very full and you don’t want to lose any chili to the burner in haste.
  5. After about three hours, remove the lid, and stir it again.  Do not put the lid back on the pot, it’s time to reduce the liquid.  Good chili takes time and we aren’t done yet, so go find something else to do.
  6. Continue to stir occasionally as before.  You may find “chili skin” on the top each time you come back during this phase.  This is entirely normal.  Press it down into the pot and stir gently to break it up.
  7. After roughly two more hours (bringing us to five hours total) your chili should be roughly two inches farther down the pot than when you started.  Stir it once more and remove it from the heat.  Put the lid back on and leave it alone for at least 30 minutes.  This will allow the chili to thicken.  If you intend to freeze or refrigerate it I recommend you leave it covered in this way overnight to cool and put it in the refrigerator in the morning.

Nutritional Information:

  • Serving Size:  1 cup
  • Approximate Servings:  17
  • Weight Watchers:  4 points per serving
  • Aproximate Cost:  $12.00 per pot.

Serving Suggestions:

  • Eat it “as is.”  It’s delicious on its own!
  • Add one link of turkey sausage per serving.  (4 extra WW Points.)
  • Add browned ground beef or turkey to make it non-vegetarian.
  • Add pasta or pour over a bed of rice for a bit of variety.
  • Add a box worth of prepared Mac and Cheese to two or more servings.

Sterilization Frustration

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The first step in making your own wine is as simple as sterilizing everything you own, expect to own, think may pass near your wine, things your wine will pass through, sit in, be near, or be able to see from inside large glass containers. It stands to reason of course that if you are trying to give one kind of microbiology the chance to thrive in your grape juice, you should be pretty sure that none of the other kinds you don’t want are hanging around. There are loads of things that can happen to wine with other little baddies growing it it. The least impressive perhaps involve the addition of less desirable flavors to the wine. Some other fun ones include the inadvertent creation of jelly like you would consider putting on your toast in the morning, or simply wine that outright goes bad before you’ve managed to drink it. Thankfully, you have to do some serious work to make wine toxic thanks to the nature of alcohol itself being very effective at killing things off. However failure to deal with cleaning agents properly is about as likely to make poison as it is to destroy the wine entirely, and that’s relatively likely.

Every kit of wine, every book about making wine, and every container of sterilizer stuff known to man will mention, probably repeatedly, that sterilization is so important that your mom being hit by a bus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to skip or interrupt the process. Personally it would stop me, but I may be an oddball among wine makers for that reason. Being relatively well prepared to make wine, or so I thought, I set forth to start making my first wine kit. I read the instructions from top to bottom, as the instructions themselves of course informed me I should do. Upon returning to the top to start actually doing the steps I’d recently read about, I managed to make it as far as step 1.

I read “Sterilize […a small list of wine making stuff…]” and panicked having not done what most wine kit makers likely consider the easiest part of the process, even if the most tedious or time consuming. Now, I fully knew this was coming and I dug out my convenient little pouch of sterilizer stuff, and switched gears to reading its directions instead. “Add 1 Tablespoon to 1 gallon of warm water.” That’s all it said.

Well, that’s really not especially helpful to me. There is an expectation of understanding being made by the funny bag of white powder in my left hand, and I entirely fail to meet that expectation. What comes next exactly? Do I leave it in a jug on the counter and stare at it funny until everything in my house is made magically clean? Do I soak things in it? If so, for how long? How about my big ass plastic primary fermenter? It’s way too big to put into anything else, so perhaps I simply fill it with the stuff and add just shy of 7 tablespoons of my cleaner to it. What about the lid though? Clearly a lid intended to fit on a bucket will not fit into the same bucket, so how can it be sterilized? My brain ran around in circles with all these questions.

After much hopeless thought on the subject, I decided I needed to wait longer before starting. Ask more questions of people that have done it, read more books and web sites, and generally continue to be afraid to start. Perhaps someday I will feel prepared enough to actually proceed.

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