Yes, I know This is DUMB (NES on battery power)
35Maybe not practical for most but I dunno, maybe someone can find a use for running an NES (or other retro consoles) off a battery bank!
I had the battery bank so I figured I'd try. TBH while I was a little intrigued to actually see it working at all I was much more curious as to how long the battery life would actually be. My initial thought was a ~10 watt system draw on a 10,000mAh battery would yield 10 hours of battery life. I know that there's efficiency loss when looking at batteries and power supplies. The capacity rating is for the battery at 3.7v and there's going to be loss in the boost converter bumping the voltage up the required 9v for this application. So okay, maybe not quite 10 hours, but what about 8 or 9? But I quickly shrugged that off as not being remotely close. There's no way this little battery is going to power an NES for anywhere remotely close to 8-10 hours! I started to look at calculators on Google and stumbled across 3.7 hours. Okay, this sounds more reasonable I thought. So I decided to call it at 3-4 hours. Well, turns out my initial quick and (ignorant) easy method of 10 watts into 10Ah giving 10 hours was closer. Probably a coincidence but nonetheless we ended up at pretty much 8 hours right on the dot! I really didn't expect this tiny battery that I can easily fit in my pocket, or the palm of my hand, to run an NES for 8 hours. But here it is!
This if anything is a real eye opener to just how little power these old consoles actually use. CPU's and GPU's have certainly gotten a lot more powerful in terms of performance, but they're supposed to also get more efficient as time goes on. But comparing this to the PS5 (or XBOX Series X) is mind blowing. These modern consoles can use 200 Watts when playing heavy games! That's 30x more power than the NES! Imagine having 30 NES systems powered on at once and realizing that's equal to just one PS5! You'd need one hell of a power bank to run a 200 Watt console like that for any real amount of time.
This should work with most retro consoles including the Sega Master System, Genesis/MD, SNES, TurboGrafx-16 and many, many more. Really anything that runs off DC voltage within the wattage limitations of the power bank. But remember I am using a 9v PD USB-C to 5.5mm barrel plug with the PD trigger chip built into the cable. You need a cable that will tell the power supply (PD power adapter or power bank like this) to output the required voltage and that also has to be able to handle the current (Amps) that the system will need. I've already shown my PD USB-C cable powering the SMS, SFC and Genesis so there's no reason to think this wouldn't work with those just as well. The bigger systems like the Genesis would likely draw a little more currant than the NES here but it would still be a very reasonable run time! But what's the point of running a system like that off battery power??
While yes, this is pretty useless as is it did get me thinking. If this 10,000mAh battery can run the NES for 8 hours it could probably run an external monitor as well. Small portable composite monitors (LCD/LED/IPS) are available and should fit into the power limitations if not here, but certainly on the larger 65 Watt power banks I've seen. Most laptop displays for example only use 5-10 watts. Not far off what the NES itself uses. So a small (say an 8-10") composite monitor within 10 watts should be able to run along side the NES here with this small battery and still get 4 hours of play time. Hell, with the larger power bank we could bring that back up to 8 hours! Someone out there must want a portable NES/monitor combo like that right? Camping with no AC maybe? Someone? Anyone? No?
Okay, so really this just shows off how cool USB-C PD and these modern GaN small and efficient power sources and batteries can be. I mean even if I have no use for this I still think it's crazy that a small palm sized battery can run an NES for 8 hours!