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If you were a hardware manufacturer and your new phone was a ROMist’s delight you’d be all like “Our phone plays Doom and totally plays Super Mario Bros. 3.” Right? You’d be bragging from here to Scranton.
Well, Nokia tried to do that with the new N900 and got in huge trouble with Nintendo. They showed a video of an SNES emulator running on the device with this voiceover.
“There’s already a bunch of great retro gaming emulator apps available for you to download,” says the video, which shows buttons that appear to open emulators for systems including Nintendo’s Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES and SNES.
Ummm, right. Good choice. Nintendo is probably going to totally sue them out of business now. You know they should have just shown Altered Beast on a Genesis emulator and been done with it.
If only there were some way to hook this up to D-Pad Hero, then the circle would be complete. As it is though, it’s merely a fully functional electric guitar made from a Nintendo Entertainment System. Wait a second, that’s totally awesome.
Actually, what really needs to happen is the guitarist from The Advantage needs to rock this thing. I think I would die from a nerd overload if I saw him jam out the Castlevania theme on this thing. I met those guys at a show in Tokyo, incidentally, and they’re cool as hell.
The project is actually an updated version of an much older NES guitar, updated with Mario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong knobs and a cartridge for the headstock.
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.
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.
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.
This is a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, you’ve basically got the coolest external drive ever created. A 160GB hard drive is stuck inside this cartridge with no other modifications but the port; it fits right in its original sleeve. It’s even bus-powered!
But! On the other hand, this is a Super Mario Bros 3 cartridge. It’d be like desecrating the temple of my youth. I could have dragged out my old NES and played SMB3 all day. Of course, I’ve already got two copies of the game, but still — what if they break? Or are stolen and turned into hard drives?
I can recall the first time I played on my brand spanking new NES, back in 1991. Now it seems that Apple has come in at the right time, with the right product. Their foray into video games has been a knock-out success. The New York Times reports from the floor of the Tokyo Game Show. There, giants like Sony and Microsoft presented their latest inventions. The gaming giants are truly dreading Apple with their iPhone, iPod Touch and the accompanying App Store. Their absence from the Show shows how confident they are in the new iPod Touch versions introduced 2 weeks ago.
And here we see one of the most useful implementations of an astromech droid to date. Modder Brian De Vitis gutted a novelty R2D2 beverage cooler and somehow managed to stuff eight old-school consoles inside. And – AND! – there’s a built-in projector. Very nice.
“To get rid of the mess of wires from his many videogame consoles, PopSci reader Brian De Vitis decided to repurpose his R2-D2-shaped cooler. The engineering student modified its legs and repainted it to look more realistic. Then he stacked the motherboards from the eight consoles on shelves inside, added a sound system, and rearranged the inputs so he could plug in controllers from the outside. To watch all the gaming action, he added a projector in the rig’s dome, just like the real R2’s.”
Judging from the photo, it appears that the consoles used are: NES, Atari, Dreamcast, N64, SNES, Genesis, PS1, and Xbox. That’s a lot of cords to keep untangled, yes, but I think you’ll agree that it’d be totally worth it.
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.
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.
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:
Metroid was probably my most favorite game in the mid to late 90s for the NES and today, Nintendo released Metroid Prime: Trilogy for the Wii. Announced back at E3 in June, Metroid 3: Corruption is packed together with Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2 Echoes all of which is encased a shiny blue metal case. M3 brings updated motion controls and widescreen (16:9) to the Wii. It’s available now for $50.
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:
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.
Oh, I get it. Because it’s shaped like a bone. I was thinking of something else. Here’s the GameBone Pro, a gamepad for the iPhone and iPod touch. It connects via Bluetooth or 30-pin dock connector and features a built-in battery to provide a little extra juice to your device while gaming, plus a built-in speaker and headphone jack.
All in all, I’m intrigued. I have an iPod touch, but I’d buy this thing more for use with my T-Mobile G1 — specifically for playing NES and Genesis games. The controller will come with an “iPod touch / iPhone stand supporting vertical and horizontal positions.”
So when will it be available and how much will it cost? The product’s website says it’ll be available in mid-September 2009. As for pricing — get this — the company is “currently open to pricing suggestions from the public.” Everyone suggest $5!
As for game compatibility, games made for the iPhone and iPod touch will need to be programmed to actually use the hardware so the company, 22moo, will be making a free SDK available shortly. Now as for using this thing with other devices, I’d hope that the buttons would be programmable to keyboard keys.
The gamepad itself features a D-pad, four main buttons, and two shoulder buttons. The company is located in Australia but it does ship internationally and is looking for distributors all over the place.
