Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the Mac Mini that was modded into an old Apple ][ Disk Drive a couple of years back? Well, the modder behind the build has now put it up for sale on eBay, to make room for other projects.

It only has a 1.5Ghz Core Solo CPU and 2GB of RAM, so it’s not the latest and greatest in Mac Mini tech, but on the other hand it’s way more powerful than the 1978 floppy drive upon which it is based. My favorite part of the mod has always been the slot-loading DVD drive that’s perfectly aligned with the old floppy disk slot.

Modder Charles Mangin has listed the 5-1/4″ floppy drive cum Mac Mini with a starting bid of $500(USD), but if you absolutely must have it, there’s a Buy-it-Now price of $1000.

As far as competitive videogames go, you can’t get any simpler than Pong. But times have changed, and so have our tastes and need for mayhem. We can’t just have birds, they need to be angry birds. So if Pong is to be played by today’s gamers – bored adults and foul-mouthed adolescents alike – it can’t just have two paddles and a ball. There needs to be chaos.

Invented by Stacy Dudley and Brad Slattery, the RetroBall is a bat-and-ball game system – let’s just call a Pong a Pong and call it Pong. It has a 32×32 pixel LED screen, an acrylic enclosure and 1-bit sound effects. It’s clearly more powerful than the Wii U. The RetroBall has four paddle controllers so you can engage in four-player Pong deathmatches, and you can even increase the number of balls onscreen to five. It’s actually kind of reminiscent of Atari’s arcade classic Warlords.

But don’t let the cutting edge graphics and complicated gameplay fool you: you can’t just button mash your way to victory here like in your other modern games, primarily because there’s no button to mash, but also because skilled RetroBall players – probably named Stacy and Brad – are aware that you can change the spin and speed of a ball depending on how you hit it.

Pledge at least $149 (USD) on Kickstarter to reserve a RetroBall game system. Launch titles include 2-player Pong with 1 ball, 3-player Pong with 1 ball, 4-player Pong with 1 ball, 2-player Pong with 2 balls…

[via Ubergizmo]

Have a bunch of old 3.5″ floppy disks lying around? If you still have some left over after converting them into paintings or handbags, you might want to redecorate your room with a floppy disk lampshade.

That’s exactly what Instructables contributor Technohippy did with his spare floppies. All it took to make this floppy disk lampshade was 17 floppy disks, 44 cable ties, and some basic hand tools. While this particular design was for a ceiling fixture, there’s no reason you couldn’t apply the same concept to a table or floor lamp too. Keep in mind that you’ll want to go with a fluorescent or LED lamp inside the fixture so as not to melt your floppies, and fill your home with the noxious fumes of burning plastic.

Pop on over to Instructables for the full build instructions. I wonder what we’ll make out of USB flash drives when they’re eventually obsolete and replaced with holographic memory or something altogether different.

Atari games redesigned in HTML 5 may bring back a flood of nostalgia, but they leave out a key part of the gaming experience: the classic hardware. Hard Drives Northwest filled that void by gutting a limited number of authentic Atari 2600s and stuffing them with modern PC components. Packing a Core i7 3.4GHz processor, the retro console now boasts 22,857 times more processing power than it did in its heyday, according to Microsoft’s calculations — more than enough oomph to handle the recent remakes. Other internals include 8GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD and a Radeon HD 6570 graphics card with 1GB of video memory. With support for USB 3.0 and 2.0, eSATA, DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI, the system is well stocked on the connectivity front. Finally, the signature of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell acts as the cherry atop the faux wood grain-toting package. While the souped-up machines aren’t up for sale, a pair of them are slated for a giveaway. Glamour shots and the full set of specs await you at the source.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Atari 2600s get PC innards, 22,857 times more processing power originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nothing is truly impossible, not if you’ve got the Impossible Team on your side. They’re known for producing instant films for Polaroid cameras when Polaroid officially shut their factories down.

Now they’ve come up with another first that instant photography lovers will love: the Impossible Instant Lab.

The Instant Lab is literally the first and only one of its kind in the world. What it does is take the digital images on your iPhone and turn them into instant Polaroid prints. Who knew that was actually even possible?

Apparently, these guys did. All you have to do is fire up the Instant Lab app, put the phone in the cradle, and slide the shutter on the base of the device open. Wait a few minutes while it does its thing and presto! The instant physical copy of your digital photo will be ejected all retro and awesome-looking.

The Impossible Instant Lab is currently up for funding on Kickstarter, where a minimum pledge of $229(USD) will get you your very own Instant Lab unit. If you hurry, you can become one of the Early Birds who can get the Instant Lab for just $189.