Gaming
Pixel-Perfect Retro Gaming with TinyNES and c0pperdragon
On February 10, 2026 by Jonathan Zdziarski
The photo above isn’t an emulator screenshot, it’s a photo of the actual Zelda game played through my system on an HDMI monitor (any moire effect is a result of taking a picture of the monitor screen itself). For several months, I’ve been playing with the c0pperdrag0n PPU Digitizer; I’ve had a lot of success soldering it into a lot of devices it was never originally targeting: an early Famicom, a NES Test Market console and as of this writing, a TinyNES. The c0pperdragon PPU digitizer easily solders onto the back of a Ricoh 2C02 PPU and converts the picture into a signal its creator has dubbed Lumacode. The signal contains all of the RGB information necessary to render individual pixels for the game in high definition. This signal can then be rendered by a few different upscalers (I use OSSC Pro) to display on an HDMI monitor with absolute perfection.
If you’re not familiar with the TinyNES, it’s fully open source hardware to create a modern, but authentic, NES clone. It comes with DIP slots for the PPU and the CPU from an original NES, and all modern SMT circuitry for the discreet logic, RAM, and other components that aren’t crucial to accuracy. You can purchase TinyNES with clone chips (which do not provide authentic sound or picture), or you can de-solder the original PPU/CPU chips from an old NES and use it in the TinyNES, giving you an identical experience to the original console. If you don’t have any desoldering equipment, you can usually find these chips on eBay as well. Not only is the TinyNES small and modern, but it’s also more power efficient and even supports Famicom expansion audio (great if you like to play old FDS games like me).
The TinyNES has often been overlooked for its much pricier competitor, the Analogue NT Noir, which is an FPGA console capable of providing HDMI output. With the PPU Digitizer, however, the TinyNES can be made to output pixel-perfect video at a fraction of the price – and running original chips, rather than an FPGA reconstruction.