It may not be the best arcade cabinet ever, but Redditor mystery_smelly_feet’s arcade cabinet is no slouch either; especially since he made it with his own two hands. Unless of course he has six hands, in which case this sort of thing is to be expected. But I doubt it. If you’re more concerned about the logic behind a NES arcade machine, don’t worry, there’s actually a PC inside.
Mystery_smelly_feet’s gaming PC has a 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 16 GB RAM, a 2GB GeForce GTX 660 GPU and a 2 TB hard drive. He wired the sticks and buttons to an Ipac 2, which he says mimics keyboard input. The monitor is a 32″ Viewsonic DE3201LED. He didn’t say what brand the speakers were, but a Redditor pointed out that they might be one of Logitech’s surround speakers.
Mystery_smelly_feet used MDF to build the cabinet, with the help of the instructions made by Arcade Controls forum member stevenpbhs as his guide. He also said the he ordered the joysticks and most of the buttons from Suzo-Happ. He got the player 1 and player 2 buttons from Paradise Arcade. Finally he based the sweet NES controller graphic on this design by deviantART member BLUEamnesiac.
As you may have guessed by now, mystery_smelly_feet uses emulators to run games from different consoles on his PC. All in all it took him a total of 2 months and close to $2,000 (USD) to finish his one of a kind gaming setup. Good job man! Now go do something about those smelly feet.
After years of thinking about it, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a custom MAME cabinet for my basement. It’s finally coming next week, so I can’t wait to try and beat these guy’s Donkey Kong high scores. Or not. But if I wasn’t getting my own arcade machine, I’d take this arcade cake instead. It’s definitely the next best thing.
This three-tier cake was made by Wedding Cakes by Nicole, and it features colorful images of classic arcade games on each of its sides. It’s got arcade-accurate versions of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Tetris, Frogger, and even Pong.
It’s even got arcade-style buttons and a coin slot. Though I bet if you tried to mash on those buttons, you’d get food coloring all over your fingertips. The only thing its missing is a couple of paddle controllers for Pong, but I’ll forgive Nicole that.
I wonder if that joystick is edible. I so want it to be a red jawbreaker.
A die-hard Legend of Zelda fan saw the wisdom in using the power of 3D printing to bring the game’s items to life. He also has the courage to sell the items despite the looming threat of Nintendo’s octorok lawyers. He calls his endeavor the Hyrule Foundry. I like to call it the Nintendo 3DP.
The potions are still being finalized and the arrows are in the wrong color, but otherwise the Hyrule Foundry features all 32 items from the classic adventure game, from the Wooden Sword to the Ladder to the Book of Magic. A bonus consequence of the Hyrule Foundry is that we now have an exchange rate for Rupees. One Rupee is $12 (USD). But for some reason two Rupees are worth $18. Hmmm. Hylian math is weird.
You can read more about the Hyrule Foundry on its official blog. If you can’t go alone without these items any longer, you can buy them at the Hyrule Foundry shop on Shapeways. They’re quite expensive though – the cheapest one is $4 for two arrows; the entire set sells for $320(USD).
I’ve seen some strange stuff over the years, but this has to take the cake as the most unusual arcade machine I’ve ever seen.
This rare vintage penny arcade machine simulates an execution. Just put in your coin, and a tiny hanging will be performed, as a bell rings out and a little figure is dropped through the gallows. Delightful fun!
The machine originally took British pennies, but was modified to accept U.S. quarters at some point.
This rare machine was created by Charles Ahrens, and is currently for sale over on eBay, with a Buy-it-Now price of $17,499.99(USD).
Is it just me, or does this thing seem like something you’d find as you wander around Columbia in Bioshock Infinite, somewhere between the vending machines and the kinetoscopes.
Here’s a coffee table that would go well with the steampunk NES. It was made by Charles Lushear of Bohemian Workbench using found items. I wouldn’t disagree if you think it’s more junkyard than steampunk, but either way it’s an impressive piece.
The cedar wood tabletop used to be part of a fence, the A and B buttons are antique clock movements and the Start and Select buttons are vintage rifle magazines. But the most intriguing part is the directional pad.
Apparently that piece of metal is a Katanga cross or a handa, a copper cross that was used as a form of currency in the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 19th to the 20th century. Katanga Katanga cross, y’all.
Lushear is selling it on his Etsy shop for $2,600 (USD). That’s a lot of Katanga crosses.
It has been over 45 years since the original Star Trek graced TV screens, but somehow this 1:1 scale Galileo shuttlecraft prop from the original Star Trek has survived, though it shows it’s age.
Last year, the shuttlecraft sold at auction and the new owners, Adam Schneider and Alec Peters, took the prop to New Jersey boat restorers Master Shipwrights, and asked them to restore the old bird. Space.com recently interviewed the team about the restoration, and here are a few highlights of the conversation…
It’s probably taken 2,000 man hours of work. It’s a world-class restoration at a world-class shop. This is not me because I have no skills as an amateur doing work. This is a fabulous facility…Not only is it going to be cosmetically good, but from a structural point of view, from a quality of finish point of view, from a quality of wood point of view, and from an ability to move it safely without damaging it. It has never been in better shape.
There’s no word yet on where the Galileo will eventually land, but its owners hope to put it on display for countless Trekkies to enjoy. It is awesome to see people restoring a piece of sci-fi history out of love for the series. Captain Kirk would be so proud.
Watching this video of this guy making his own model of the Starship Enterprise D – then making it fly – is truly inspirational. It is a fully functional R/C model. It’s even illuminated by super bright LEDs and fiber optics. Honestly, I was in geek heaven watching this.
YouTuber TheMiro59 built this functional model of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D last year. It doesn’t fly perfectly, but it does fly. The video takes you through the build process and all of the test flights. The first flight is kind of funny as it nose dives into a net like it had been caught in a Tholian web – though after a while, he does get the hang of flying the decidedly less than aerodynamic starship.
Still, all I can say is this guy did an awesome job. The man believed it and lived the dream. Now somebody needs to start mass-producing these so we can all own one.
I’m probably dating myself, but I still have a massive collection of old vinyl records gathering dust in bins in my closet. I actually no longer have a turntable, so other than the few records I purchased as CDs or in digital formats, I haven’t listened to them in a dog’s age. So when Crosley was nice enough to let me take their Spinnerette Turntable for a spin, I was happy to oblige.
I love the retro design of the Spinnerette, which has a carrying handle and a flip-down turntable surface for playing your old 33s, 45s and 78s. To the right of the turntable is a monophonic speaker, along with volume and tone controls, while underneath the turntable are connectors for USB, headphones, and even auxiliary audio in. Since it’s built from plastic, you’re not going to want to throw it around, but records themselves are delicate things too.
The Spinnerette isn’t just any old turntable. It can both play records and convert them to digital files. Just connect the turntable to your PC or Mac via the included USB cable, install the software, and you can copy records to digital audio files – assuming you have the patience to listen to your entire record collection as you rip them into your computer.
The bundled software is actually the open-source Audacity, which is available for both PC and Mac and can record audio via the turntable’s USB connector. I first tested the software on my Mac (running OSX 10.8.3). You’ll definitely want to read the software installation guide provided on the installation DVD, as there are a number of steps to setting up Audacity to record the best quality sound from the turntable. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to get audio that wasn’t distorted and clipped, and I also had to hunt around for something called LAME in order to get MP3s to output from Audacity. Having no success getting undistorted audio on the Mac, I switched to my Windows 7 PC and had much better luck there. It took only a couple of minutes to get up and running on my PC without the clipped audio I experienced on the Mac.
Once you get the Audacity software set up, you hit the record button, put the needle on the turntable, and let the record play all the way through. When finished with one side of your record, you can use Audacity’s “Silence Finder” to automatically detect the beginning and end of tracks. This process is a bit fiddly, and doesn’t work on 100% of recordings, but on most records with definitive breaks between tracks it does the trick. That said, you can manually tag tracks as well. Once the tracks are divvied up, you can bulk-save them as individual MP3, WAV or OGG files.
Overall audio quality of digitized recordings is indistinguishable from the original records – at least to my untrained ear. Here’s an example recording I grabbed from an old Rolling Stones’ recording of Not Fade Away:
Not too shabby, I say. Audacity also provides the ability to normalize volume levels, and clean up pops and scratches if you so choose – though I kind of like the charm of the old scratchy LPs. Speaking of which, part of the fun of the Spinnerette is the fact that it’s a complete, portable turntable, amplifier and speaker, so you can listen to your old records they way they were meant to be heard – on a small, monophonic speaker. I’m not a turntable snob, but there’s definitely something very special about listening to vinyl records this way, versus digital files. I’m not saying it’s something I’d do every day, but it’s a welcome treat. Of course, I’ll have digital versions of my records once I’m done ripping them anyhow.
Overall, I’ve had fun with the Spinnerette. At its core, it does what Crosley says it will – play vinyl records and convert them to digital files. I have to say that while I’ve enjoyed dusting off my old records and listening to them on the Spinnerette, the process of ripping records to digital files is time-consuming and requires a bit of trial and error. And for Mac users, it appears to be flat-out broken. It would be much better if Crosley would develop their own simplified software just for performing the task instead of trying to use Audacity, since the target audience for turntables is probably a bit older and less tech savvy anyhow. Bottom line – if you’ve got numerous records to rip, it could take quite some time and effort to get them converted. On the plus side, you’ll only have to do it one time, and then your vinyl memories will be forever preserved in digital form.
You can get the Spinnerette turntable over at Crosley Radio for $149.95(USD), in either blue or red.
Disclosure: Crosley Radio provided the turntable for review in this article. However, all reviews are the unbiased views of our editorial staff.
Ahhh, the venerable Atari 2600. The godfather of console gaming has, in recent years, seen a resurgence as a hacker’s muse — mods to its innards and controllers are legion on the web. Recently, a new mod emerged: a controller that combines the capabilities of the Atari’s joystick, paddle and keyboard controllers. It’s crafted from a small wooden box, a cannibalized joystick, an Ethernet cable, some switches and a smattering of other electronic bits, and there’s a full how-to on making one of your own on Instructables, courtesy of user x2Jiggy. If the mere mention of such an all-in-one has those DIY juices flowing, head on past the break for a construction video and see how it’s done. It’s high time you dust off your stock 2600 and break out Pitfall, Adventure or, well, Breakout.
It’s been quite a while since Capcom released an official Mega Man game; even its 25th anniversary gift to fans Street Fighter x Mega Man was mostly made by a fan. So forget about doing something right; it seems that if Mega Man fans want something done at all, they have to do it themselves. That’s what Philippe “MegaPhilX” Poulin and his friends are trying to accomplish with Mega Man Unlimited.
According to a Destructoid article from last year, MegaPhilX initially came up with Mega Man Unlimited just to join an animation contest sponsored by Capcom-Unity. When he decided to go ahead and make it a full game, he intended it to embody his ideas of what Mega Man 10 should be like, since the game had not yet been released at the time. MegaPhilX says that the design for Mega Man Unlimited was influenced by Mega Man 9 and 3.
MegaPhilX and five of his friends – Kevvviiinnn, ThunderThouin, Gabriel, Jocelyn and Jansim – have been working on the game for several years now and Mega Man Unlimited is finally in alpha stage. Let’s cut them some slack though, it’s not like programming this game is their full-time gig.
Here’s the latest trailer for the game:
And here’s its debut trailer, which MegaPhilX uploaded last year. It lays out the plot of the game and also shows gameplay footage:
MegaPhilX can’t say when they’ll be finished with the game, only that it will be released as a standalone PC app with support for both keyboards and game pads. Keep an eye on the Mega Man Unlimited website and Facebook page for updates on the game.
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