Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve received hundreds of thousands (of kilobytes) worth of submissions for our #ExpandThrowback contest and we want to thank those who valiantly opened up their closets, garages, attics, or just pivoted to the other side of their desk and snapped photos of their best in retro tech.

We’ve gathered as a team at Engadget HQ and winnowed the pickins’ down to our top 20 favorites. Now it’s time to turn the decision on who wins over to you.

Here’s how it works. Click here to jump right to our contest page on Facebook. Peek through the pics and vote for your favorite. To keep it fair, we’re only allowing one vote per Facebook account.

On September 20th, come back to see who won. What will the winners get?

• First Prize Winner: All-expenses paid passage for you plus one to Engadget Expand in New York, including airfare, hotel room, transportation and food (ARV $3,000)*
• (4) Second Prize Winners: We’ll give you a $250 gift card so you can finally ditch that StarTAC and pick up a shiny new phone (they even have touchscreens now!).

Don’t forget, if you’re not already connected to all things Expand, stay tuned to our Expand hub for the latest news. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

*Prizes mentioned in this article are bound by the official rules of the contest.

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A handheld gaming console that plays Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Halo, Uncharted 3 and Day Z ? We’re intrigued. The Cross Plane resembles a Wii U GamePad and the two have something more in common than just a launch price: both mirror video and audio output to their respective controllers. The difference is that unlike Nintendo’s faltering console, the Cross Plane uses wireless HDMI to do so and (as demonstrated in the video after the break) can basically stream content from any device with an HDMI port — including Ouya, PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Whatever it’s plugged into bears the processing load, meaning that if your PC can’t run Crysis 3, neither can the Cross Plane.

Designer Advanced Gaming Innovations (AGI) also implemented swappable cartridges (the red bit sticking out in the above picture) containing system-specific hardware support. This serves two functions: One, it cuts down on “interference and issues” between the analog and digital layouts of certain architectures. Next is that it ensures you only have to buy carts for the systems you want, presumably cutting down on price. Speaking of which, a $349 pledge snags you a unit with one system cartridge and $410 nets you a handset with two. Both of these help push AGI closer to a $350,000 Kickstarter goal that even the company admits is lofty. It’s not like more expensive ideas haven’t been crowdfunded before…

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Kickstarter

A few years back, I posted a tiny papercraft model of the Nintendo DS Lite that was a big hit. A bit later, I found some teensy paper models of other gadgets and video game consoles. Paper. Isn’t that cute? Today’s geeks skip all the glue, X-Acto nicks and tape mess and go right for 3D printing instead.

Thanks to Dave Nunez, you can print out your own Atari 2600 and NES consoles. The models are just big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The buttons and switches aren’t perfectly to scale, they’ve been exaggerated a bit to capture the spirit of the original consoles – in miniature.

You can grab the digital files for the tiny Atari 2600 and NES over at Thingiverse. I figure while you wait for the 3D printer to output your models, you’ll figure out a way to cram a tiny computer inside of these so they’re actually playable.

[via it8bit]

Remember the days when ticker tapes would continuously churn out stock prices? Unless you’re somebody’s great grandparent, probably not. People have gone paperless these days, rendering these machines pretty much useless. Or are they?

While they’re not being used to print stock prices anymore, they are being used to print tweets. At least that’s what British web developer Adam Vaughan is doing with the steampunk-looking contraption that he built from scratch called the Twittertape Machine. The machine has a microcontroller and a thermal printer hidden on its base and connects to a computer via Ethernet. It then checks Adam’s Twitter account every half hour.

Adam explains where he got the inspiration for the Twittertape: “I got the idea that I’d really like to have one on my desk, but of course they’re incredibly rare now and sell for huge amounts of money. Then it struck me that even if I did manage to get one it would just sit there gathering dust, doing nothing. So I had the idea that I would build one of my own, one that actually functioned… I was trying to think about what information it could produce, and of course Twitter is just a perfect fit – short succinct messages just like the stock movements of old.”

[via C|NET]

These days you can run dozens of classic games on a PC using emulators. If you’re good with modding hardware, you may be able to connect the right controller for the console you’re emulating. But if you’re Patrice Daubaire, you take it one step further. Patrice hacked 75 controllers to make them compatible with over 110 gaming systems.

Patrice calls his ingenious mod the Multi Video Game System 2 or MVGS 2. He managed to universalize 75 controllers – from an Atari 2600 joystick to aPlayStation controller – so that they’ll work with different gaming systems via a custom VGA adapter. Patrice claims his system has zero input lag and that the controllers weigh more or less the same as unmodified ones. Patrice was also able to add additional functions like a quick save button on some of the controllers.

To present his invention, Patrice built the MVGS 2 Dream Station, a PC with over 30 gaming system emulators. It has a nice cabinet with a built-in monitor and lets up to two players geek out. He also setup a rotating display stand for the controllers.

Pick your jaw up from the floor and head to the MVGS 2 website for more information.

[via Hack A Day]