NES
by Dave Freeman on October 15, 2009

Ahh the Konami code. Favorite cheat of gamers for years, it lives in legend and will never die. Much like that Rick Astley video. And while it might not be the most secure way to lock your data, it certainly raises your geek cred.

by Doug Aamoth on October 6, 2009

ubernesBe still my beating heart. The UberNES Nintendo Screen Saver displays a grid of multiple working NES games when your computer is idle. Leave it be, and you’ll see all the various demos running at once. Hit the spacebar and you can actually start playing the games.

Tears of joy, my friends. Tears of joy.

Review: Cheap portable media player with built-in NES emulator
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by Doug Aamoth on September 4, 2009

NES

Behold! A portable convergence device from faraway lands! It plays music, it plays videos, it takes photos, it’s an e-book reader, a dictionary, a notepad, it slices, it dices, it does it all! But none of that matters. None of it. Why? Because this little $30 gem plays NES games.

And so we dance…

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by Doug Aamoth on September 4, 2009

NESDig up your old NES cartridges, ladies and gents, and prepare to blow them. Wait. Blow out the dust from them. That’s what I meant. Buy.com has the “8-Bit Retro NES TopLoader Video Game System” for just $15 with free shipping.

by Doug Aamoth on September 2, 2009

nebudroidSay hello to Nebudroid, an Android application that turns your phone into a NES controller for use with emulators. It also serves as an accelerometer-based steering wheel for racing games.

by Doug Aamoth on August 24, 2009

NESWe’ll go ahead and file this one under “Things I Want In My House” and tuck it away in the filing cabinet for later perusal. Here’s a counter-top Nintendo arcade that basically consists of an XP machine running a NES emulator, all connected to a 17-inch LCD housed inside a custom-built cabinet made of MDF.

by Doug Aamoth on June 30, 2009

dockOld NES controller, meet iPhone. An enterprising individual over on the iPhonefr.com forums (careful, everything is in French!) has turned one of the most iconic controllers of all time into something that holds one of the most iconic electronic gadgets of the present day.

by Doug Aamoth on June 14, 2009

PreGot a Pre? Like Nintendo? If you fit in the overlapping intersection of that particular Venn diagram, then have I got some good news for you. Some enterprising individuals over at the Pre Dev Wiki have gotten a NES emulator up and running on the Palm Pre.

by Doug Aamoth on June 3, 2009

GEN-XHot damn, folks. If all the talk of newfangled gaming coming out of E3 this week has you longing for a simpler time, might I suggest — nay, demand — that you consider the $50 GEN-X Genesis/NES Game System from ThinkGeek?

Quick Review: Nesoid NES Emulator for Android
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by Doug Aamoth on May 26, 2009

I’m a big fan of the T-Mobile G1 but to say that the selection of quality games from the Android Market has been underwhelming (at best) would be sugar-coating it. Luckily none of that really matters any more, as Android finally has a decent NES emulator.

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by Doug Aamoth on May 13, 2009

NESPortable 8-bit gaming sort of hits the mainstream with ThinkGeek.com now selling the $50 Retro Mini Handheld NES System. Unlike those far more convenient, yet far less legal portable emulation machines that you have to purchase from far away lands, this handheld ships right from the U.S. of A. and plays actual NES cartridges.

by Devin Coldewey on January 16, 2009

The things people will actually put up for sale! I think I remember hearing about this thing a long time ago, but I’ve never seen one before. Essentially a all-in-one system with 15 actual cartridges built right in, the FamicomBox was used in hotel rooms and arcades. It’s got a bunch of the classic games for the system, although I can’t read all of their titles. It’s got Mega Man and Ghosts & Goblins, which is more game than anybody in the world can handle, though, so there’s no risk of beating everything on it.

by Doug Aamoth on December 24, 2008

Nintendo_entertainment_systemThe year was 1986. The Nintendo Entertainment System had been out for about a year and absolutely every kid in the entire universe had one except for me. I’d resorted to casually inviting myself over to the houses of friends, non-friends, enemies, and strangers, just so I could play Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and RBI Baseball. I wasn’t proud of it, but it had to be done. I was hooked.

Get your combination NES-SNES-Genesis right here
4 Comments
by Devin Coldewey on November 4, 2008


I saw one of these things at PAX. It’s a great idea; after all, the actual hardware involved has become extremely small. You can fit an NES into a cartridge if you want to. So it makes sense to stick all the circuitry in a box, add some cartridge interfaces, make some ambiguous controllers, and sell it as a super-console. The one I saw was NES and Genesis, like this one, but there’s a new one that will include SNES as well. The regular is about $40 and the other one I’m guessing would be $60-70.

The bad news is that the hardware isn’t original Famicom and Sega stuff; I was told by the Pink Godzilla people (or else read on the box, I don’t remember) that it doesn’t support all mappers. To the layperson, mappers are sort of the ground level of a game, governing how sprites move about, how game objects in general interact, and so on. Final Fantasy would run on a different mapper than 3-D Worldrunner, for instance, and tempting as the SG/FC is, I wouldn’t want a console that can play one but not the other.

NesBox: A cute little casemod for your hard drive
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by John Biggs on October 6, 2008

This fellow is selling a $180 hard drive case mod he built out of an old NES cartridge and a 250GB hard drive. By stuffing everything inside the case, he’s creating what we can only describe as a Nintendo cartridge that could potentially hold the code on every other game cartridge in existence along with a copy of King of Kong.

I recently purchased an external drive and was disappointed with the enclosure, this may sound shallow but when you spend money on something, you want it to look and feel exactly right.

From these humble beginnings Nes-box was born, my next task was to see if my plan would work, so I dismantled one of my old nes cartridges to size it up against the drive. The cart was almost a perfect match and the drive fitted quite snugly inside its new jacket.

For less than a dollar per gigabyte you, too, can enjoy the sight of Mario melting as your drive slowly overheats.

via Giz

What’s on your list of all-time best Nintendo levels?
by Doug Aamoth on September 15, 2008

Great piece over on OMG Nintendo about the top ten all-time best Nintendo levels. The staples are there like 8-4 from Super Mario Brothers, the Dark World (above video) from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Rainbow Road from Mario Kart. Oh, and let’s not forget Giant Land in SMB 3 – that was unreal at the time.

What would you add? I’d probably add the final level from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, the first level from Super Contra, and River City High in River City Ransom, to name a few.

[via Digg]

XBox 360 Coin-op: It’s a bad idea
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by John Biggs on August 28, 2008

With the announcement of the coin-op Xbox 360 console, the Arcade Station T2, we hearken back to one of the most amazing evenings of my life. But first, the T2. This is basically a licensed console with two 360 controllers hanging off of it that will play any game including multi-player mode. No official availability or price.
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Turn your old NES into an 8-bit lunchbox
by Doug Aamoth on August 15, 2008

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The weekend is fast approaching so here’s another little project for you. Take an old NES console, gut it, and add a couple hinges. Poof! NES lunchbox.

The step-by-step can be found over on Instructables.com, but here’s the short version. Again, take an old NES console, gut it, and add a couple hinges. The trickiest part seems to be removing all the little plastic posts inside – the ones that hold the motherboard and all that good stuff in place. They can be removed with a rotary tool and cutting wheels, though. The main missing element for this lunchbox is that there’s no handle. That’s up to you to figure out, I guess.

[via DVICE]

Mod your old NES into a DVD player
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by Devin Coldewey on August 5, 2008

Yes! This is awesome. Of course, anything related to modding an NES is awesome. Personally, I don’t watch DVDs that much — or if I did, the player’s guts wouldn’t fit into a Nintendo. Still, this is a cool mod and if you have a non-working NES sitting around (that you don’t feel like fixing), it won’t run you more than $40 or $50.

Now if I were modding an NES I’d see what I could do about mounting a hard drive onto a cartridge interface and see if I could pass ROM information through — every NES game ever, on one cartridge! Sadly I’m not quite crafty enough for that. Still, a man has to have a dream. [via MAKE:blog]

Old NES cartridge modded into portable emulator
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by Doug Aamoth on July 7, 2008

nes-cartridge

Ah nostalgia. An enterprising individual over at the BenHeck forums has “basically cannibalized a OneStation” into an old NES cartridge that runs on three N-cell batteries (commonly found in certain scientific calculators). The innards of the cartridge house a 99-in-1 chip which should provide nearly endless hours of entertainment and contain most of your favorite NES games.

The batteries fit in the bottom of the cartridge and the Select and Start buttons are found on either side of the bottom notched portion. Looks pretty cool and the modder says, “Building it is actually pretty simple, nothing complicated just moving around components to make room.” Why not get started on your own, huh?

via Geekologie

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