We eulogized the Sega Dreamcast yesterday, and even though today, September 10, isn’t really all that significant in the life of the Nintendo 64, we present to you a photo montage of the life and times of Nintendo’s little system.

In the montage: The Donkey Kong 64 bundle, which I’m not too ashamed to say that I had once upon a time (even though it had a problem with saving games for some reason); the N64DD, which was as big of a flop as I’ve ever seen; Ben Heck’s portable N64; and the elusive golden N64, which I cannot remember for the life of me.

We had the launch day N64 (and I do mean launch day, my Dad pre-ordered the system quite early) and the aforementioned Donkey Kong bundle. And I had the launch day copy of Ocarina of Time, complete with the now-banned Fire Temple song. I was a baller, basically.

When I interviewed modder extraordinaire Ben Heckendorn a couple of months ago, he mentioned that he’d been working on building a pinball machine from the ground up and that it’d be called “Bill Paxton Pinball” when all is said and done. While it’s not quite together yet, Heckendorn has made some serious progress on the actual cabinet itself, which now includes photos of Paxton in various movie and TV roles such as Twister, Big Love, and True Lies.

The TV and movie themes won’t just be found on the outside of the pinball machine, though, they’ll also be incorporated into the scoring and obstacles:

The idea with the pinball is to have the modes based off popular Bill Paxton movies, for instance, in “True Lies” mode, you’ll need to shoot combos and multipliers to I guess get into Jamie Lee Curtis’ pants.

Some current other mode ideas:

• Titanic: Probably a ramp shot, then the ball rolls down a miniature “sunken Titanic hallway” with a chance at 3 exits for x1, x2 or x1 multiplier. This fills a “Heart of the Ocean” light matrix near the flippers (hung around the neck of Britney Daniels from Club Dred) that gives a big bonus when full.
• Aliens: Hitting the 4 position drop target cues “Hudson, run a bypass”. There will be (2) 2 digit LED counters near the drop targets, representing the ammo in the Alien guns (starting at 99 each) At random intervals gunfire is heard (aliens being shot) and the counters drop. The goal is to clear all drop targets before they reach zero, if successful, you get points equal to the counters X 1000.
• Twister: Probably not much for this one as there already exists a Twister pinball. Mostly quotes, and one of the metal rails will probably be vaguely tornado-shaped.

If the ball goes down the drain the game will play a mode-specific negative comment, for instance, in “True Lies” mode, Paxton would probably say “I got a little dick, it’s pathetic!”

Look it’s Bill Paxton’s family from the weird HBO show “Big Love”! Instead of multiball this game has BIG LOVE MODE, in which you must juggle 3 balls at once – fitting, eh? Also notice above the moon (”Apollo 13″) there is a greasy pork sandwich being served in a dirty ashtray.

Outstanding stuff. This machine will rest forever in Heckendorn’s house because “since it clearly contains artwork and sound from movies, it could never legally be resold.” So if you want one, you’ll have to build your own.

Hold Flipper for Status Update [BenHeck.com]

This version uses a 17-inch, 720p Gateway 1775W monitor and has the standard assortment of WiFi, USB ports, and memory card slots. We just wish that we were as talented to create such a device. Access to his assortment of tools would be great too.

Benheck via Techeblog

Modder extraordinaire, Ben Heckendorn (see our interview) has just finished version 2 of his Commodore 64 laptop. This one will be auctioned for charity and features an SD card reader for loading up various software (games!).

Per Ben:

It is very similar to the first C64 laptop I built, with the key difference being it uses the newer 1541-III Ultimate SD-card based storage solution / disk emulator. USB and Ethernet ports for this device are open and available on the front of the unit.

Other features include dedicated 1541 menu buttons, dual joystick ports, and an original Commodore 64 keyboard.

You won’t be able to buy one unless you bid in the upcoming charity auction for this item. Proceeds will go to benefit the American Cancer Society. No details about the actual auction yet, unfortunately.

Commodore 64 Original Hardware Laptop Revision 2 For Charity! [BenHeck.com]

I recently sat down with the king of gadget modders, Benjamin J. Heckendorn.

Ben recently spoke at the Games for Health conference here in Boston, where he talked a bit about his Access Controller, which was born from a request for a controller that could be used with one hand by a soldier who had lost his arm in combat.

Heckendorn also brought up the idea that Microsoft ought to make a “Brain Box” available for the Xbox 360, which would enable people to make their own controllers without having to deal with licensing issues. Microsoft would still make money by licensing and selling the Brain Box, while hackers and modders would be free to create unique controllers like the Access Controller without having to go through the expense and legal trouble of getting the controllers approved for retail sale. Sort of a standardized peripheral concept, if you will.

Ben spent about a half hour with me before his presentation. Here’s the transcript:

CG: When you were a kid growing up in Wisconsin, what’s your first memory of something you ripped apart – your first mod?

BH: Oh, that’s a good question. Let me think. Well, I had an erector set so I would build things and then rip them apart. Because, you know, I only had one erector set so I had to recycle it. I was “going green” even back then.

CG: Were you one of those kids that just took anything apart that you could get your hands on?

BH: Yeah, I’d take apart old radios a lot. And probably my old Atari computer, which I still have – I used to take that thing apart all the time. Sometimes it was because Pepsi had been spilled on it. And usually I’d try to put stuff back together, that’s always the trick. As long as I could get stuff put back together, my mom didn’t really care. When I got a little older, I had more complicated things like camcorders. I would take that kind of stuff apart.

CG: Did you ever take something apart that you couldn’t get back together? I remember as a kid taking the family computer apart and I couldn’t get it back together. My parents were infuriated.

BH: I’m sure there was stuff. In general, usually there was always a screw left over. Even now, I don’t think you can put something back together properly if there isn’t a screw left over. I think they just put in extra screws to be left over. You take a laptop apart and there are always screws left over. But it’s all over-engineered anyway. It’ll be all right.

Dreamcast was something I took apart. I was going to make a portable version but I couldn’t really figure out how to do it. Other people have figured out how to do it now, though, so I’m glad. Now I don’t really need to do it. But I never really put that back together. So I do have a lot of sort of bastard, forlorn circuit boards laying around in a bastard, forlorn bucket.

CG: What’s your favorite mod that you’ve done?

BH: I’m pretty proud of the Commodore 64 laptop because, aesthetically, it looked great. I’m actually building another one and the intention is to auction it off for charity. It took me about two years of tinkering to get one to work, then I redid everything from scratch in about a week and a half. And now I’m trying to build this other one and it’s having problems, so it’s taking me longer.

It’s like one of those things where you have to go through two motherboards for some reason. Anyway, it’s going to have the better disk drive access system that people had been asking about. Like, “Why doesn’t it have this?” The 1541 Ultimate or something like that. So it’s slightly improved but it pretty much looks the same.

So it was one of those things where when I was painting it and putting it together I was like, “Damn, this looks good.” I’m usually not too self-conscious about stuff like that but with this one I was like, “This looks good.”

CG: With your mods, do you usually come up with all the ideas yourself or do you take a lot of ideas from your website’s forums and other people who follow your work?

BH: Any more, it’s almost exclusively what people input to me. Basically I’ll sit there checking Facebook and wasting time on the internet and if an interesting request comes in and they’re willing to pay, I’ll do it.

As long as it’s interesting. That’s kind of how I got into accessibility controllers, because I’m like, “Oh, this is interesting,” and kind of an interesting challenge. There will always be e-mails like, “I would like a Gamecube mixed with a coffee pot, blender, iPod, and floatation device,” kind of like you’d see in the SkyMall catalog, and stuff like that doesn’t really interest me.

But yeah, most of it is user submitted now. I very rarely build anything on my own accord any more. Actually, I am putting together another Pelican Case laptop thing for Xbox kind of for fun, but mostly just to use up parts. So mostly user submissions now. They’re the ones that want this stuff, not me [laughs]. My own Xbox 360 isn’t even modded.

CG: Yeah, that’s my next question. What’s your house like? Do you have stuff coming out of the walls and zip lines and stuff like that?

BH: No, you’d be surprised. Except for my work area, it’s quite clean. I have an Atari hooked up to my living room television now, which is a great conversation piece. It still works.

There’s a guy on my forum who’s name is Parker Dillmann, from a college down in Texas, and he came up with a really cool mod called the Longhorn Engineer Video Mod. It’s a little circuit board that he made, and you hook it up to your Atari and it gives you composite video and S-Video. It works great. So I got one of those from him at a convention, pimped it on my site, and I use it on my Atari.

I had a hell of a time getting the Atari to work at all. I have a big BRAVIA TV and, at first, the Atari didn’t work and I had to really tweak my own video mod to get a picture to show up, but Parker’s mod worked great. So the moral of the story is, yeah, he’s got a good video mod at LonghornEngineer.com.

So yeah, I do have an Atari, which is a fairly geeky thing to have on your TV. I used to try to have every system possible hooked up but now I just have Xbox 360 and Atari. That’s about it. You don’t have to move a circuit board just to sit on the couch, though. Because who wants that?

CG: Nobody! You’d rip your pants! So which console do you find is easiest to mod?

BH: Modern consoles? Because all-time, it’d be Atari. But for modern consoles, the Wii is pretty easy to work with mostly because it’s simpler and smaller. The Xbox 360 is actually fairly easy to mod but obviously since they double as nuclear blast furnace ovens, you have to think about heat and whatnot.

PlayStation 3 is definitely the hardest. I think with Sony – first, there’s not enough games for it – but hardware-wise, it’s very well done. It’s a very nice piece of equipment. But of course it’s all proprietary because it’s Sony. I like Sony but they kind of take the long way around the barn. I love Sony, though. Everything I buy is Sony. Except for my Xbox 360.

CG: One of our writers, Matt Burns, is dying to know: what is your favorite tool?

BH: My favorite tool? Oh gosh. That’s a good question. I love when I get good questions. Usually it’s always the same ten questions in the same order. My favorite tool?

For the longest time I didn’t use dremels, but now I swear by it. It’s like my third arm – or whatever number arm would be appropriate for your readers. Believe it or not, I have this little pair of tweezers that I got at, like, Wal-Mart. I’ve had them for about ten years and I actually probably use those the most – just a little simple pair of tweezers that are very useful because my fingers are only so small.

I do have some favorite screwdrivers from back when they used to make the things in Japan, probably back from around 1984. I still use them every day.

CG: Do you have any ridiculously complicated and expensive equipment that you use or is it mostly old-school screwdrivers and tweezers and stuff like that?

BH: Except when I have stuff done on a CNC machine, it’s mostly old-school. I have a belt sander and I’d like to have a drill press, I should really get one of those. Maybe I’ll ask nicely for one next Christmas. Not really, though, no. I do have an infrared thermometer, which is kind of fun. So I can point it at the Xbox 360 and say, “Oh, look, ten thousand degrees.”

The Xbox 360 is actually much cooler now that they’re on the third revision and the GPU and CPU are both 65 nanometers. It’s probably almost up to 30 degrees cooler but, yeah, that hardware definitely runs hot.

I think that – and I’ll probably never get a job at Microsoft if I say this – if you look at the Xbox, if Microsoft designed a car, it’d have no front grill, no radiator, and the exhaust would just kind of float off the engine. That’s kind of how the Xbox 360 is built.

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken apart a PlayStation 3, but it’s frickin’ awesome. Like all these heat pipes coming off the main chips, and there’s this fan that’s like six inches in diameter. So mostly at the base is this fan that’s turned by a big radiator. If you think of a Chevy Metro or a Smart Car, this is probably bigger than the radiators in those cars. But seriously, the whole bottom of the PS3 is basically metal, copper, fans, and cooling. Instead of, like, oh here’s some fans on the back that’ll just lazily pull out air.

It’s very well built – too expensive, though. Maybe that’s why it’s so expensive.

CG: Have you done any mods that have just gotten way too out of control? Any Frankenmods?

BH: I don’t know about, like, in scale or complexity but the original version of the Commodore 64 laptop was pretty much a complete and utter failure. The guy I was making it for was really patient with me but at one point, I was like, “Screw it,” and everything was scratched.

And I’ve done that before. I’ve built entire arcade cabinets – my friend wanted one for his company – so I tried to make this big fancy thing. It was all curvy and it looked like it was something from, like, Soylent Green or Computer Space. It was getting too complicated so I had to scrap it and just make an angular one, which was still fairly well done.

And I think I’m on the fourth year of trying to build a pinball machine. I love pinball. And I have this Neo Geo arcade cabinet that I built and I thought, “Has anyone tried to build a pinball machine from the ground up?” So I’m plugging away at that and I have a lot of the parts. The theme is “Bill Paxton Pinball.”

CG: Oh, nice!

BH: Because I wanted a theme and I was like, “What’s just ridiculous, but everyone understands it? Oh, Bill Paxton – the finest actor of our generation.” He’s got a lot of great quotes and I like cheesy actors like Bill Paxton and William Shatner.

CG: I used to perform at this improv place in Minneapolis and there was a show running there called Paxton versus Pullman. The whole premise was that nobody can ever tell which one is which.

BH: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s like all those mirror-mirror episodes where they’ve got the two Bills and someone yells “Shoot!” and the guy with the gun is like, “Which one?!”

One of them always has a goatee, and that’s how you know who’s who. [Laughs]

Check out BenHeck.com for more of Ben’s mods.

Here are some photos from Ben’s presentation at the Games for Health conference:

Here’s a pretty cool mod for the Guitar Hero World Tour drum set that allows you to trigger the kick drum by blowing into a tube. Modder extraordinaire Ben Heckendorn received "a request to build an alternative to the GH4 drum kit’s kick pedal for a person who uses a wheelchair" and managed to whip something up with a little bit of PVC pipe, some hot glue, and a rubber glove.

The GHWT kick pedal apparently contains "a piezoelectric sensor which creates a small voltage when impacted" and the idea behind the mod is to make it so the sensor reacts to air pressure instead of the pressure that’s created when your foot presses the pedal down.

If you’re handy and have all of the necessary parts lying around, it doesn’t look like this project would take too long — maybe half a day or so. Check out the full instructions here along with some notes on how this mod would work for the Rock Band drum kit.

Air Pressure Kick Pedal for GH4 [BenHeck.com via hack-a-day]

All-star modder Ben Heckendorn takes a walk down memory lane with the (surprisingly) one and only PC case mod he’s ever built. It’s a computer ensconced in an empty 18-pack of Miller Genuine Draft that he built back in 2004 when he "needed a portable computer to do the looping for [his] independent film but was too cheap to buy a laptop."

While it’s probably not exactly rocket science to build a PC inside a cardboard box, the attention to detail that’s made Ben Heck a household name among DIYers everywhere is there in full force with an elaborate CD burner apparatus jutting out of the top of the box. He basically took the entire drive apart and rebuilt it in layers, creating a cool 3D effect using cardboard from a second MGD box. The end result looks like some sort of Star Wars building.

Other features aren’t interesting now that it’s 2009 — 4GB hard drive, K6-300 CPU, 16MB VooDoo video card — but it’s nice to remember the good old days of dropping a mint on a VooDoo card and a multi-gigabyte hard drive, eh?

[via Make]

Benjamin J. Heckendorn—that’s BenHeck—transplanted the brains of an Xbox 360 controller into an Atari 2600 shell. The result is this, the 3600 Controller.

Mr. BenHeck calls this latest creation a “quick, fun project.” That is, it’s not one of his more “epic” deals.

You can’t use this for proper Xbox 360 games—I don’t see the trigger buttons, but the rest are there—but it should be useable on those more simple Xbox Live Arcade games. I recommend World of Goo if you’re looking for one of those.

via Xbox-Scene

Ben Heckendorn has done it again with another Xbox 360 Portable. Unlike his last Xbox 360 Laptop though, this isn’t just an upgraded Elite version.

Calling it the Xbox 360 Portable, Ben has nixed the keyboard, but has added the ability to swap hard drives, more accessible memory cards, better layout of ports and buttons and internal Wi-Fi.

I personally think that the best thing is that this one looks a lot less cheap and plasticky than his previous creations.

Keep it up Ben!

Jacob Seidelin is fast becoming the Ben Heckendorn of Javascript games. You may remember that in early April, Seidelin programmed all of Super Mario Bros. into 14 Kb of Javascript code. This month, he’s tackled Super Mario Kart in about 11 Kb of code.

It’s not the full game, however.

“So far, it’s just racing. No weapons or any of that fancy stuff. At the moment, you can choose from 3 different drivers (Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach) and 2 different maps (Mushroom Cup Round 1 and 2). There is no lap count, no timer and no finish. You can just race around forever and try to beat the others (it’s not hard, especially if cut a few corners). The AI is rather crude, but seems to work ok for the time being.

There is (simple) collision detection against the boundaries of the map and the colored “blocking” blocks, but not against the karts, so you can’t crash into the other drivers. Drive safely, anyway!”

But hey, it’s Javascript. Very cool, nonetheless. Check out Seidelin’s blog post here, which links to the game.

via Ajaxian

Here’s Ben Heckendorn’s latest invention. It’s a pedal for Guitar Hero (and presumably Rock Band) that controls the strumming and whammy bar functions, so people with only one good arm (and presumably chronic masturbators) can rock out like everyone else. Heckendorn built the pedal for the Games for Health conference.

These replace the strum and whammy bar from a standard guitar, allowing you to use a single hand for the chords. What you do is use your foot and click your toes up or down to strum or navigate menus. To perform a whammy you lift up your heel…The pedal plugs into a modified Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul wireless controller. You can still strum the modified guitar but the whammy is only on the pedal.

Pretty cool. The cable from the pedal to the guitar is from an Atari Jaguar, too. Nice.

Guitar Hero pedal controllers [BenHeck.com] via Kotaku

Remember the Apple IIgs? I had an Apple IIc but my friend across the street had the Apple IIgs, the lucky bastard. Oh what I wouldn’t give to be a kid again. Not a care in the world except trying to get from the castle to the bottom of the mountain without falling to my death in King’s Quest III. Anyway, Ben Heckendorn has built a gorgeous laptop version of the Apple IIgs with the following specs…

• Large 15″ color screen. Much bigger than the ones on my other 8-bit computer projects (thus far)
• Uses an original Apple IIgs motherboard with RAM expansion.
• Custom acrylic keyboard. It uses the original keyboard PCB, but the buttons were custom made for a cool modern look.
• CompactFlash adapter inside unit functions as an original equipment hard drive.
• Glowing backlit “][” logo. Blue for on, with a bit of yellow during disk access.
• Built-in stereo speakers.
• Side port access for floppy drive, joystick and mouse.
• Can play Arkanoid II!

The keyboard looks pretty sweet. All the air vents are just for show, too. Big points for nostalgia there.

More info and photos over at BenHeck.com if you’re interested.

via Wired

World class modder Benjamin J. Heckendorn—BenHeck—has “dropped” a new Xbox 360 controller mod for us all to admire. It’s a one-handed controller that’s still powered by two AA batteries. You may recognize the D-Pad on the controller—that’s because it’s from the PlayStation.

Mr. Heck is currently working on a mass-produced version that looks quite a bit different than this model.

How ’bout those Rockets?

New single-handed controller [BenHeck via Xbox-Scene]

Ben Heckendorn is not your average case modder. This guy is “El Numero Uno,” as they say in the small Latin village I was raised in. Somebody with a lot of money told Ben they wanted an Xbox 360 that they could carry around with them and use wherever he liked. So Ben put the thing into a 2.8-inch, 14-pound box that only has one cable coming out of the back for power. Not content to just fulfill the mobility requirement, he also improved the original design by building a water-cooling system that works much more effectively than the 360’s stock cooling system. It’s a thing of beauty, really. HD gaming on the go, it’s the way of the future, I tell you.

Ben Heckendorn’s Xbox 360 laptop: best mod ever? [Engadget]