Hasta La Gadget!

Both the original NES console and VHS tapes were popular back in the 1980s, so it actually doesn’t seem that unusual to see the two in the same picture together. Though I can honestly say I’ve never seen an NES inside a VHS tape – until now.

The VideoTendo 2000 is a fully-functional gaming console built into a VHS cassette. And while it’s actually an NES clone that’s Etsy seller ShinoBicycle used to achieve the feat, at least it plays physical cartridges. In fact, it’ll play Famicom games as well as PAL and NTSC NES games.

It’s a pretty neat mod, though it looks to me like he had to rip the tape out from the inside of the VHS cassette and stuck images of them in the windows in their place. At least that’s what it looks like to me from the pics. It’s not like you were going to try and cram this into your VCR anyhow, were you?

So bust out your big hair and your Power Glove and head over to Etsy, where you can grab the VideoTendo 2000 for the odd price of $224.94(USD). Remember when buying a movies on VHS cost $89.95? Now the price of the VideoTendo doesn’t seem so bad does it?

Maybe someday, he’ll put an Atari 2600 inside a BetaMax tape.

Wow. NicksplosionFX just created a time machine of emotions by stitching together every single—yes, every single—original Nintendo NES video game start screen in one epic video. The whole shabang lasts 3 hours and goes in alphabetical order and has so many memorable beeps and boops that you can’t help but feel like a kid again (or at the very least, nostalgic).

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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]

If you’re in the mood for some next-generation action on your past-generation emulated games, a fellow by the name of plotor has just the bit for you. What this hacker/developer … Continue reading

A couple of years ago we got a peek at what several NES games might look like if they were rendered in voxels instead of pixels, courtesy of deviantART member John Buonvino. Programmer ProcyonSJJ was inspired by John’s renders and decided to take them a step further, making a voxel engine for the NES emulator FCEUX.

According to ProcyonSJJ, “[t]he renderer takes the color in the upper left corner and treats that as the clear color while at the same time ignoring any pixel in the image buffer composed of that color (no voxel).”  In very simple terms, the engine will make voxels out of all the pixels, except for the ones with the same color as the “background”. This makes his engine work best with games that have single color backgrounds, as you’ll see in his demo video:

Sadly, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to toy with NES games using the voxel engine. Zeromus, one of the lead programmers of FCEUX, refused to integrate ProcyonSJJ’s engine into the Windows port of the emulator. Then the two had an argument and I don’t think the engine was incorporated into any version of the emulator. I’m not going to simplify their points here since you can read their messages for yourself on the TASVideos forum. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to cherish the video.

[TASVideos via Tiny Cartridge]