Hasta La Gadget!

A few years ago we featured a harmonica crammed into a NES cartridge. YouTuber basami sentaku’s harmonica not only has a Famicom cartridge case, it produces 8-bit sound with the help of a sound chip from a NES. It also has a mode that plays the coin sound effect from Super Mario Bros. when you blow into it.

Watch basami sentaku and his friends play some chiptunes on the harmonica:

I’d love to hear non-video game music played on that. Basami sentaku-san, I’m sure you’d make a lot of chiptune fans happy if you started selling 8bit harmonicas.

[via Viral Viral Videos]

Firebox has a special offering to gamers in the UK who grew up in the 80s. The store is selling soaps that look just like the cartridges of Nintendo’s classic consoles, the SNES and the Game Boy. They even have cover art on them, although it looks like those are just made of paper and will quickly melt off the soaps.

The SNES cartridge soaps include Super Mario Kart and A Link to the Past, while the Game Boy soaps include Tetris, Earthworm Jim and Pokémon Red and Blue. The latter are even in their respective colored cases.

Firebox is selling the Game Boy cartridge soaps for £7 (~$12 USD) each, while the SNES cartridge soaps cost £13 (approx. $21). If you’re not from the UK, check out the famous Etsy shop Digitalsoaps. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Firebox gets its stock from Digitalsoaps.

[via Game Informer via GoNintendo]

Inkjet printers are relatively cheap. That’s because it’s the inkjet printer cartridges that will burn a hole in your pocket. It’s the old razor-razorblade business model.

Depending on how often you use your printer, you could be changing cartridges as often as every week. You could save your old cartridges and get them refilled, and just buy a new one if it gets busted… or you could just print your own. 3D-print, I mean.

Frankly, it’s about time someone did this!

InkFactory recently used a 3D printer to print an inkjet cartridge. A standard ink bladder was installed, and voila! That’s a ton of money saved minus the mess and the hassles that usually come with most ink cartridge refill kits. Of course, there is the matter of the amount of time it takes to print the cartridge shell itself.

They used a MakerBot Replicator 2 to print the cloned Kodak inkjet cartridge, which is relatively simple in design. Cartridges for other printers might be more complex, but I think it’s only a matter of time before they get the 3D-printed treatment.

Now all we need is a 3D printer that prints 3D printer parts. Oh wait, we already have one.

[via Softpedia]

I’ve got a confession to make to my wife. Without her approval, I’ve been gradually transforming our basement media room into a shrine to all things geeky – with a decided tilt towards retro video games. I now know what pillows I must purchase for the couch. As a matter of fact, I just paid for them as I write this.

These awesome retro pillows look like classic NES game cartridges – though they feature some non-existent games on them – presumably because nobody wanted to pay Nintendo some exorbitant licensing fee. At least I don’t remember playing Unicorn’s Revenge or Lava Jump on my old 8-bit system. But then again, my brain might have been deprived of oxygen from blowing on all of those cartridges.

The pillows are made from polyester, and they measure 14″ x 12″ x 3.5″ each, which makes them too big to cram into your console, but much more comfortable than sitting on a stack of actual cartridges.

You can order a pair of the Retro Video Game Pillows over at ThinkGeek for $34.99(USD). Now when can I have some Atari 2600 cartridge pillows?

I think back to the days of my old 8-bit NES console and when games came on cartridges. There were definitely advantages of the medium, in that you never had to worry about scratched discs, and they loaded instantly. On the other hand, the contacts got all dirty and dusty and you either had to blow on them or clean them with an eraser to get them to work sometimes. You won’t have to worry about that with these cartridges, though.

That’s because all of the data that’s written to Cart Notes is displayed right on the outside, in plain sight. They look just like the old NES carts, but are actually sticky notes.

Fangamer sells Cart Notes in three-packs for $8(USD), which include orange, green and blue accent colors, and 50 notes per-pack, for a total of 150 sheets of paper. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be enough space to write down all of the source code from Duck Hunt, but it is plenty good enough for writing down grocery lists and other reminders.