The Super Mario Bros. theme is nearly 30 years old. It’s quite old, but not as ancient as the sheng, a Chinese instrument that’s mentioned in texts from 11th to 12th century B.C., which means it could be about 3,000 years old.
Whoever made the accordion-like instrument couldn’t have imagined that it would be used to meet the poster boy of a modern art form.
Watch the past meet the present:
That escalated right from the get go.
[via Gizmodo]
Now’s your chance to see The Legend of Zelda through the eyes of Link. Modder Ubiquitron is working on ZeldaVR, a port of the legendary NES game for the Oculus Rift. Can you gather the fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, defeat Ganon and save Zelda before you get motion sickness?
Here’s YouTuber Vaecon trying out the beta of ZeldaVR:
Take this link to VirtualReality.io and download the ZeldaVR beta, which lets you play in the overworld and in the first dungeon. Ubiquitron will release the full version of the game this March.
[via GoNintendo]
Retro video game artist James Bit is now selling a series of prints featuring the characters of Pro Wrestling, the classic NES game and source of the infamous “A Winner is You!” meme.
James probably lost to Great Puma a lot when he was a kid, because King’s grandfather is missing from James’ roster. Fighter Hayabusa, Star Man, Kin Corn Karn, Giant Panther, The Amazon and King Slender are all here.
Have your browser jump from the top rope and head to James’ Etsy shop to order a print. Each one costs between $25 to $200 (USD), depending on the size you pick.
[via it8Bit]
A couple of days ago we saw how you can play NES games on a stock iOS device. It turns out you don’t need to jailbreak your iOS device to play Game Boy Advance games on either, thanks to Riley Testut’s GBA4iOS emulator.
Riley already made a version of the emulator that works with iOS 6; he coded GBA4iOS 2.0 specifically for iOS 7. The new version has lots of features, including a convenient but shady method of grabbing digital copies of games to play. Unlike the NES emulator, GBA4iOS is an actual iOS app – but installed outside of the App Store. You actually have to set your device’s date back to an earlier date to install it for some reason, though.
Here’s Operationidroid with a beginner’s guide to the emulator:
Head to the GBA4iOS site on your iOS device to download the emulator. Remember to only play DCOGTYLO.
[via Lifehacker]
Looking for a new watch? Love video games? Then you’ll love the Classic Arcade watch. Granted, it’s bulky, but the fact that it looks like you’ve got a miniature arcade strapped onto your wrist more than makes up for it.
The tiny joystick is ornamental, but every press of the red button makes a “pew” sound effect and lights up the watch’s display so you can check what time it is. You won’t find numbers on the watch; instead, you’ll be able to tell what time it is based on the positions of the tiny spaceship and the asteroid that’s in pursuit of it.
The Classic Arcade wristwatch is priced at $59.99(USD) and will be available in March 2014. So start saving up your quarters now.
[via Gizmodo]
After releasing LEGO miniature kits for the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64, Chris “Powerpig” Mcveigh takes on the king of 8-bit consoles. His mini NES is made of 220 LEGO pieces, including two controllers and a couple of cartridges that can be inserted into the tiny console.
Blow into your browser and head to Chris’ online store to pre-order the kit. It costs $58.50 (USD) and will ship on March 3.
[via Pocket-lint]
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]
You might think you need a watch that can check email
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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.
You might recall back in September of last year when we mentioned that a time capsule buried in Aspen, Colorado back in 1983 had been discovered. The time capsule was originally supposed to be unearthed in 2000, but no one could find it. The cast and crew from the TV show called Diggers set about trying to locate the time capsule and were successful.
The episode of the show with what has come to be known as the Steve Jobs Time Capsule will air on February 25 on the National Geographic Channel. In case you forgot, the capsule was buried as part of the International Design Conference in 1983. Jobs was on hand at the show and tossed the mouse from his Lisa computer into the capsule.
The people who dug the capsule up say that there was a strong smell of mold inside indicating that some damage likely occurred to the content. The good news is that the Lisa mouse and other items had been sealed in a plastic bag.
I wonder what sort of other items were found inside.
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