Since it’s all about the geek cred, one of the clever monkeys at Protodojo built a custom flash drive using an NES controller. Not content to just make a cool looking drive (and it is cool, no doubt) the intrepid builder also added a security feature that requires you to enter the aforementioned Konami code in order to access your data.

Now obviously, this is a one off product, and not available for sale. The good news is, if you were slightly dishonest and saw this sitting somewhere and grabbed it, you’d at least know how to access the data.

[via Joystiq]

Be 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.

If you don’t have any ROMs, there are around 100 downloadable demo movies “that provide over two full days of unique NES gameplay footage,” according to the UberNES.com website. Aside from that, installation consists of copying the Nintendo Saver.scr file into your Windows/System32 directory (yes, Windows only) and then pointing it at your ROMs directory to create a library content to pull from. You don’t need to install a separate emulator in order to play the games either.

Nintendo Screen Saver [UberNES via OhGizmo!]

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…

Officially called the “1 GB Portable Media Player” and available from computer parts vendor Geeks.com for $30, this device features a 2.5-inch LCD screen with 320×240 resolution, a 4-way directional pad, and four action buttons. You’ve also got an OK button, an ESC button, and a top-mounted power button. There are two tiny, tinny speakers on either side of the screen, a 1.3-megapixel camera on the back, and a miniSD card slot and a reset button underneath.

This review will focus solely on the NES emulator feature. Please watch the video below if you don’t feel like reading.

For starters you’ve got 1GB of built-in storage to work with, which ought to be more than enough for all your favorite NES ROMs. Actually, if memory serves, all the NES ROMs in the world don’t take up an entire gigabyte. The device shows up as an external hard drive in Windows Explorer and ROMs are dropped into a pre-made folder called GAMES.

I had trouble getting a few titles to work correctly. Some just wouldn’t load at all, some would play the first few seconds of audio and then crash out, and some contained jacked-up graphics. While a fair amount of these non-working ROMs could just be bad ROMs to begin with, my favorite game of all time — Bad News Baseball — doesn’t work even though it runs fine on my computer. Most of the games I threw at this thing worked just fine, though.

Actual processing power is surprisingly impressive. Games run smoothly and with full audio, closely resembling gameplay on an actual NES console. The screen is bright and detailed, and I was able to play games for hours on end without any eye strain or headaches.

Battery life is a bit iffy. I’m able to squeeze in about an hour and a half of play time before I need to recharge. On the flip side, the device is super light. The first time I picked it up, I thought the battery was still in the box.

The D-pad is on the mushy side, but it gets the job done. I found games that require a lot of precision — some sports games and shooters, for example — to be frustrating from time to time but, hey, the thing costs $30. Racing games, side-scrollers, and fighting games all played pretty well, though. The A and B buttons are correctly placed (B before A) and work just fine, although they’re pretty small and spaced closely together. I did get used to them pretty quickly, despite my Shrek-sized thumbs.

One glaring omission is that the volume can’t be controlled while you’re playing games — it can only be turned all the way off in the device’s settings menu. So you’re stuck with sorta-loud audio or no sound at all unless you use headphones. Even with headphones, though, the audio level can’t be changed. Inexpensive device or not, the ability to control volume levels should ALWAYS be included. You can control the volume while using the music and video playing features, though, so it’s just been left out of the emulator.

Another thing I personally would have liked are save states. In most computer-based NES emulators, you can save your in-game progress to one or more save state slots, to be continued later. Not here, unfortunately. You’ll have to go super old school and write down game codes just like you used to when you were a kid. It was fun and nostalgic once or twice, but it got old faster than a first-timer on prom night. I’d even trade the volume control feature for save states. Unfortunately, I have neither.

All in all, though, if you love old NES games, you should probably treat yourself to this little doodad. It’s literally provided me with hours and hours and hours of enjoyment and it makes a great travel companion. At $30, too, even cheapskates like me can’t complain about the price.

1GB USB 2.0 MP4/MP3/ FM/Voice/ Camera w/2.5″ LCD [Geeks.com]

Dig 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.

Sanctioned by Nintendo? Probably not. Two controllers included? Maybe. There’s really not much in the way of a product description aside from “Dust off your old NES games! This NES top loader system will play all your classic NES 8-Bit Cartridges.”

Whatever the case, it only costs $15 and it’s managed to grab the top sales rank on Buy.com today. So get while the gettin’ is, how you say, good.

8-Bit Retro NES TopLoader Video Game System [Buy.com via FatWallet]

Say 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.

While the client-side software that needs to be installed on your computer isn’t quite ready (Mac and Linux versions are also on the way), here’s a demo video showing everything in action. Looks pretty cool so far:

More info at Nebudroid.com if you’re interested.

[via Les Mobiliens (French)]

We’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.

The actual cabinet and computer building doesn’t seem too complicated, but the owner really did a number with the controller board there as there’s a lot of soldering involved. Not that soldering is rocket science, it’s just that my delicate blogging fingers wouldn’t be able to withstand even the slightest tool-related mishap.

The finished project features the standard NES control layout, plus two rear-mounted USB ports along with two actual NES controller ports so you can use the actual old-school control pads. Here’s a video showing everything off:

I like this. I like this very much.

How to build a Nintendo arcade [Instructables]

Old 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.

It actually doesn’t look like it’d be all that complicated to produce. Clear out the innards of the controller, make a little slit for the iPod connector to fit into, and glue everything in place. Voila, as the French say.

Forum iPhone [iphonefr.com via Geeky Gadgets]

Got 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.

It’s not for the faint of heart, as it’ll require you to gain root access to your Pre followed by compiling FCEUltra and then tweaking a few display settings to get the games to run at 320×480 resolution. But if you’ve gotten your hands dirty before and you know your way around Linux, it’s a fairly straightforward five-step process. Actually, the fifth step is “Play your favorite games.” So that’s an easy one.

Pre Dev Wiki [via Engadget]

Hot 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?

It’s a console that plays both NES and Genesis cartridges, comes with two Genesis-style controllers, and hooks up to your TV via composite cables. Sure, you could go the computer-based emulation route for much cheaper but there’s something oh-so satisfying about blowing out those dusty cartridges. Bonus: it “plays most Japanese import games” as well.

GEN-X Genesis/NES Game System [ThinkGeek]

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.

It’s called “Nesoid” and, while emulation purists will scoff at the notion of charging money for emulation software, the program only costs two bucks and there’s a trial version available that allows you to play Chip N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers all the livelong day.

As for ROM support, Nesoid ran just about every ROM I threw at it and the program features save- and load-states so you can save whatever game you’re playing mid-level and pick right back up where you left off the next time you load up Nesoid.

Sound and music, much the bane of any mobile emulator’s existence, works okay on Nesoid. It gets a bit choppy, especially in more intricate games like the ones put out in the NES’ later years (see Super Mario Bros. 3 in the above video), but the sound can be turned off, which improves framerates considerably. And apparently the sound is smoother if you’ve upgraded your handset to Cupcake. I haven’t yet, so I won’t comment. As it stands now, though, it’s just a minor annoyance that sometimes results in some slowdown here and there but doesn’t detract from the experience enough to be a true deal-breaker.

The control scheme is better than I thought it’d be, but still not great. You can’t use the trackball at all, which may have been a nice thing to use as the control pad. Instead, the default key settings are 1, A, Q, W for up, down, left, and right, O and P for the B and A buttons, and delete and enter for select and start. These buttons can all be reconfigured, and you can assign turbo keys and diagonal direction keys as well.

The interface itself is nice and polished, with a file manager-style list of ROMs that you load up onto your SD card. Games load quickly and hitting the Menu key mid-game allows you to save your current game, load a previously saved game, or choose a new game to play.

For $1.99, Nesoid opens up a whole new world for portable gaming fun on your G1 handset. It’s not perfect by any means, but it easily works well enough to justify the tiny price tag. Check out the above video and take the demo version for a spin first and see how you like it.

Portable 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.

The system takes 4 AA batteries and supposedly runs for over eight hours. There’s also a built-in 2.4-inch LCD screen, speakers, and composite video output to your TV for some true nostalgia. You’ll need to go up into the attic and find that box of NES games while this thing’s in transit to you but once everything’s in place, get ready for some good old cartridge-blowing, button-mashing fun.

Retro Mini Handheld NES System [ThinkGeek.com]

There should be a coin slot on there, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where. It’s almost certainly heavy as lead, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to switch between games at a snap. I’d hack it personally, I’ve never been a fan of Adventure Island or Fighting Golf (whatever that is).

It’s currently going for 10,000 yen, which is about $110 — in other words, an absolute steal if you live in Japan.

[via Nowhere Else and Journal de Geek]

The actual unwrapping of the console was somewhat uncomfortable, due to the fact that it was given to me on Christmas Eve by my grandmother and I was made to open it in front of all my cousins, none of whom had Nintendo but who desperately wanted it as badly as I did. I restrained my glee, anxiously fidgeted in the car as we drove what seemed like 100 miles home, and watched my dad try to hook the thing up for 45 minutes before grabbing the cables myself and proclaiming, “One side, father! I’m only seven, but someday I’ll be a gadget blogger.”

The brief nanosecond between pressing the power button and seeing the initial RC Pro AM screen materialize seemed even longer than the car ride home, but there we finally were, my four-year-old brother and I, driving remote control cars around on a 700-pound wood-paneled Zenith TV. I won, naturally, as I’d been playing every Nintendo game ever released over and over in my head since the console had been released. That, and my brother was four.

Christmas morning brought two additional games in Ghost Busters and RBI Baseball. I remember thinking to myself that nothing would ever eclipse that moment. I see those Lexus ads on TV where the kids get the best presents ever – an Atari, a pony, etc. – and when they grow up, they find that getting a Lexus for Christmas is somehow better (!) and I wonder to myself about the exact moment when their souls were sucked out of their bodies by the pursuit of the almighty dollar, punctuated by an overpriced status symbol.

Drop an entire dealership in my driveway — I’ll take the Nintendo feeling any day.

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.

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

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]

I learned a lot that day. I learned that I wasn’t very good at coin-op video games. I learned that I wasn’t good at video games, period. And I learned that you should never, ever play exact console versions of video games on a coin-op console. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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]

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]

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