Hobbyist Levi is the latest to take the venerable and classic NES to new realms in the modern era, with his new NES Radar turning an NES into a flight tracker.
It’s pretty crazy to think of an over 40 year old piece of tech tracking modern airplanes, but with a little hardware work, a custom ROM, and a prayer to the retro computing gods it’s something that Levi managed to do. With the NES Radar, the NES becomes a live air traffic scope and can see all of the aircraft traveling around any airport by entering that airports ICAO code.
To make this work Levi needed first for the NES to connect to the internet – so he sets up a server on a local computer and then connects the NES to it. Building on the work of past homebrewers, he is able to send information via the controller serial port. By using the controller 2 port he is able to transmit data from the NES to the computer and vice versa. With the USB side of the connector plugged into the PC, and the program running on PC, he was done on that side. On the NES side, it needs a custom ROM loaded, typically via a cart like the Everdrive which you can put any ROM on and then bam, it’s running.
The NES will then ask for an airport ICAO code, and putting it in Levi’s program shows the traffic scope of whatever airport you want to see, based on the adsb community flight tracker.
The project is based on his previous C64 Radar project, but I mean making an old computer do something is just a lot less impressive than making the old, highly customized consoles of yore do something crazy like this. The NES never got any type of modem or official online capacity, but more than 40 years after Mario led it to conquering so much of the world, people are finding new ways to delight and surprise us still.
