Introducing- The Turbo UNO!! (Keith Courage shows off his latest creation!)

Long time forumite wizard, Keith Courage, has presented the community with many excellent modifications and hardware tips over the years, however he may have outdone himself this time with his latest creation!  Presenting the Turbo UNO! 


"If you think I just put a PC engine inside here then guess again.

I hacked a DUO motherboard in half!

Why would I do that you say? I have no idea. I always wondered what it would look like since the DUO casing always looked to me as if two halves of a system were thrown together.

The original DUO had so many problems it was not worth fixing them. Someone prior to me receiving this broken DUO had tried to repair a bunch of stuff and mucked it all up. Not to mention the original case had melted warped/burn marks all over it. I was able to cut the bad parts of the casing out. I was hoping to leave the text that says pad on the controller port hole but things didn't line up well case wise to where I could keep it. I wanted the cut in the casing to not be noticeable from up above and that part turned out great."

Does it support saveram?

"Unfortunately no save RAM. The only way that would have been possible is if i had made the case much larger then it is. it would have ended up looking like a three-quarter inch size duo system. The shaping would have looked horrible because part of the CD Drive side would still have to exist(case wise)  I was trying to go for something that would have looked as streamline /stock looking as possible."

"Also, before I hacked the board in half, I was only able to access the system memory bank 50% of the time. So there was something really messed up trace wise in that section of the board as well. So no big loss. "
  
"I didn't have to do much at all to have everything work other than solder in some wires for the controller port. Everything else just works as is. The difficult part was all the cutting done for the casing and board to get everything lined up just right. I used a mix of Hot glue in some areas and two part epoxy in others to hold the case together. After using a file to create a notch in the motherboard I was also able to get 4 screw holes to line up nicely.

And yes, I cut right through a bunch of unneeded chips that were most likely bad anyways. I felt like being destructive. " 
 
 Check out the original forum post here at pcenginefx.com!!  Join in the conversation!