The project itself was pretty straightforward—at least for someone who’s turned rehabbing old boomboxes into a major hobby. One of the really cool things about the Montgomery Ward model was that it included a tiny, black-and-white TV screen next to the cassette deck. To get the display to play nice with modern technology though, Colin replaced it with a small LCD display. The innards of the SNES Classic, which is just a tiny circuit board, were easy enough to load into the bottom left of the boombox casing, right below the speaker. That’s where the controller ports are located as well as the reset switch.

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From there, he has an HDMI cord running to the display and a power cord running to a 12-volt battery pack modded into the back of the boombox casing. Meanwhile, an HDMI audio extractor outputs the sounds of the SNES to the boombox’s auxiliary input, thereby linking it into the rest of the audio system.

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And because he added an HDMI splitter, there’s a second output that allows you to plug the SNES boombox into any other display if you want to play SNES Classic on your big-screen. Based on preliminary testing, the system’s able to stay on for nearly half a day on a single charge.

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Colin got his start retrofitting vintage boomboxes with Bluetooth functionality, and the SNES mod was just for fun. Now that it works though, he’s considering going on with the NES Classic as well, he said—that is, if he can get his hands on another Montgomery Ward in good shape.