NES Cart Shadow Box Mount

I designed a 3D printed frame for mounting an NES cartridge in a shadow box.

Design
NES Cartridge Mount Solvespace CAD Model
I designed the part in Solvespace, a free and open source parametric CAD program.


3D Print
NES Cart Display Mount 3D Print
It prints flat with no supports required. I chose to print in standard PLA, 20% rectilinear infill, 3 walls, with no top or bottom shells since they will not be visible. There are holes in the part specifically to make this style of print work more effectively. Skipping the top and bottom shells cuts about 2 hours off the print time and makes the part more flexible.


Cart Fit
NES Cartridge fit front NES Cartridge fit back
The hooks at the top fit into the snap tab indents of the cartridge, meaning this only works for the 3-screw variants. I printed test parts for each section before printing the full thing. The fit is comfortably loose on each section but combined together it's a pretty secure hold.


Screws
Screw counter bores Screw back view
There are counter-bored holes for #2 wood screws. I ended up only using 2 of the 4 holes and in retrospect it would have been better to have one of those holes be a slot with a washer for easier angle tweaking.


Shadow Box
Shadow Box Velvet
I bought a shadow box from amazon and covered the foam core back plate with adhesive backed velvet. Poked some holes, screwed it together and...

Yellow Zelda Test Cartridge in Shadow Box
It turned out pretty nice. I measured carefully for the left/right centering, but for the vertical centering I just eyeballed it. The asymmetry makes it look weird if you center it exactly.


Download
Contains STL file and Solvespace CAD file.


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Comments
2024-04-27 06:23:00
why would you frame a cartridge
now u can't play it...
Badspot2024-04-27 22:06:45
If I want to play Zelda, I have the grey and gold carts to choose from. This yellow version of the cart was only issued to Nintendo authorized repair centers and thus has a very high value as a collector's item. The internal board and rom are the same as the commercial release.
2024-05-02 15:05:36
holy crap i think i just nerdgasmed
this.. is.... WIN!!!!!!!111
Pissmilker2024-05-09 08:16:14
Why Solvespace? It's just a more constrained OpenSCAD. (And I'm not giving any credit to OpenASSCAD here either, it's also objectively bad)
Badspot2024-05-09 08:39:40
Solvespace is a CAD program. OpenSCAD is a programming language. They're not even remotely comparable.
Pissmilker2024-05-09 10:05:23
Like I said, Not giving credit to OpenSCAD either, it sucks. Besides, OpenSCAD has "CAD" in it's name lol.


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