Hasta La Gadget!

Want an retro arcade cabinet, but don’t have a ton of space for one? Look no further than the Minimal T80s, a pint-sized arcade cabinet that you can buy for your desktop.

This weensy little arcade cabinet measures just 15.7″(H) x 7.87″(W) x 7.87″(D). The cabinet is made from durable MDF, melamine and PVC, and has a real 8-way arcade joystick and four buttons. The controls are connected to the tablet via USB, to ensure instantaneous feedback, and the whole thing plugs into a wall outlet.

Games are played on a built-in 7″ Android 4.2 tablet, which is preconfigured with MAME and a custom small-screen front end, and ready to load up your favorite game ROMs. Naturally, since it’s running Android, it can play all kinds of other emulators as well.

So bust out all those rolls of quarters you’ve been saving for the arcade, and head on over to Etsy to order your Minimal T80S arcade cabinet for about $280(USD). The cabinet comes with the standard vinyl decals shown here, but you can order custom ones for around $28 extra.

You can easily find NES emulators for Android devices, but you’d have to jailbreak an iOS device if you want to install a similar program on it. Until now. WebNES is a web-based emulator that runs on mobile browsers, including Safari on iOS devices.

Conrad Kramer, Jared Wright, Bogdan Vitoc and Evan Klein made WebNES during the 2014 PennApps hackathon. The site lets you play a few homebrew games by default, but you’ll get the most out of it if you load NES ROMs on your Dropbox account then play them on WebNES.

It sounds neat, but it’s not quite perfect. As you’ll see in iDownload Blog’s demo video below, WebNES can’t run games at full speed and slows down a bit more as you play. You also won’t get any sound unless you plug in speakers or a pair of headphones to your mobile device.

Enter the Konami Code and head to webn.es to get your 8-bit fix.

[via iDownload Blog]

When I first saw OpenEmu, it was already able to play games from different previous gen systems, but it had this experimental streak to it. Four years later, it has put its wild days behind. The new OpenEmu is a suave and streamlined application that looks and behaves like a native OS X program.

OpenEmu uses open source emulators for the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo DS, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega 32X, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16 and the Virtual Boy. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to switch between emulators to play digital copies of games that you legally own (henceforth known as DCOGTYLO). Simply load DCOGTYLO into OpenEmu and it will figure out what emulator each one runs on, similar to how your computer automatically opens your other files in their respective programs (well, most of the time anyway).

Another great feature of OpenEmu is that it downloads game covers for your DCOGTYLO over the Internet, then presents it in interfaces that OS X users will be familiar with, such as Cover Flow. Those two features combine to give you an elegant way to organize and view your DCOGTYLO collection.

But OpenEmu really shines if you take the time to get to know its more technical features. For starters, it supports a wide variety of gamepads, from generic USB controllers to the DualShock 4. It also has a variety of video filters that can make you fell like you’re back in third grade, looking up at a 15″ CRT TV, when you’re actually playing a DCOGTYLO on your MacBook Air. At work. Here’s a great preview of OpenEmu by Lon Seidman:

You can download OpenEmu for free. The emulator’s developers also bundled a pack of homebrew games for those that don’t have a DCOGTYLO to play.

[via OS X Daily]

If you’re tired of modern computing this morning, how about starting your day using an Amiga 500? Thanks to Google developer Christian Stefansen you can do just that, and it’s awesome.

Read more…

The New York Public Library recently discovered a treasure trove of video games in its archives created by psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Over 375 floppies (talk about flashbacks) containing a “dozen or so” games developed by the LSD-advocate in the ’80s — some are playable via emulation — are now on display in the library’s rare books and manuscripts division, according to The New York Times. The good doctor’s digital works had a self-help bend to them, advocating self-improvement by interactive means as opposed to pharmaceuticals, and apparently recreational drugs as well. If you fancy yourself a cyberpunk, Leary also had an in-progress project based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer, replete with writing by William S. Burroughs and a soundtrack by Devo. He had more than just prototypes, too: His Mind Mirror was commercially released in 1985 and sold 65,000 copies for publisher Electronic Arts. If you can’t make it to the NYPL, a version has been adapted to Facebook so you can glean your personality profile from your… profile.

[Image credit: Jaycobs / Flickr]

Filed under: Gaming, Alt

Comments

Via: Kotaku

Source: The New York TImes