Hasta La Gadget!

Imagine Slowpoke starting a ColorWare franchise and you get the concept behind Lëkki. The French gadget shop sells and repaints only old – but beloved – gadgets, such as the Motorola StarTAC 130. Their latest (?) offering is the Nintendo 64, a console even older than Motorola’s thousand-year old flip phone, but no less popular.

The console is available in four colorways and comes with a similarly colored controller and a copy of Super Mario 64, which is probably the best launch game of all time.

Lëkki sells the bundles for €120 (~$165 USD). Note that these refurbished consoles are PAL versions, so check if you have a compatible TV before you order.

[via Nintendo Life]

Most of the nixie tube hacks and mods we’ve seen involve clocks, which isn’t surprising considering the tubes were primarily used to show numbers. But there are also tubes that display symbols, and those are the ones put to good use by Lasermad in its Nixie Chessboards.

Lasermad uses ex-Soviet Nixies from the 80s. They also designed a neat chessboard that uses induction coils to power the tubes. All you have to do is plug the board to an outlet and the tubes will automatically light up when you place them on the board.

Here’s a demo video of the board:

You can order the Nixie Chessboard from Lasermad either as a ready-to-assemble kit for $340 (USD) or as a fully built set for $759. Note that the DIY kit is not for beginners, although Lasermad does have a help forum for people who opt to get their hands dirty.

[via The UberReview]

Remember when we used gadgets called “tape recorders?” Well, now you can relive the prehistoric era of portable cassette tape recorders, but with your iPhone in place of the cassette.

The iRecorder looks like one of those old luggable cassette recorders that predates the seminal Sony Walkman. Like it’s distant relatives, the battery-powered iRecorder sports a speaker and buttons that actually work. But in this case, the buttons control playback of your iPhone 4, 5 or 5S, and the volume of the speaker. It’s even got one of those pull-out handles for carrying it around.

Ironically, the one thing iRecorder doesn’t do is offer a record button. Instead, the red button is now the play button. I’m assuming that’s because they couldn’t figure out a way to trigger recording through the iPhone’s headphone jack. Still, we get the point, and the iRecorder is a fun gadget for those looking for a retro gift for old fogies like me.

You can grab the iRecorder from CraziestGadgets for $49.99 (USD). I wonder how well the window on the player lines up with this app.

Firebox has a special offering to gamers in the UK who grew up in the 80s. The store is selling soaps that look just like the cartridges of Nintendo’s classic consoles, the SNES and the Game Boy. They even have cover art on them, although it looks like those are just made of paper and will quickly melt off the soaps.

The SNES cartridge soaps include Super Mario Kart and A Link to the Past, while the Game Boy soaps include Tetris, Earthworm Jim and Pokémon Red and Blue. The latter are even in their respective colored cases.

Firebox is selling the Game Boy cartridge soaps for £7 (~$12 USD) each, while the SNES cartridge soaps cost £13 (approx. $21). If you’re not from the UK, check out the famous Etsy shop Digitalsoaps. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Firebox gets its stock from Digitalsoaps.

[via Game Informer via GoNintendo]

Programmer Paul Koller managed to make a full-fledged Commodore 64 demake of Terry Cavanagh’s beloved Super Hexagon. For the record, I behate it. It’s so freakin’ difficult. But I love Paul’s demake because even if it turns out to be as hard as the original game, at least it won’t take up a lot of my hard drive’s space. Micro Hexagon clocks in at a mere 16 kilobytes.

For comparison, the Android version of Super Hexagon is 28MB while the iOS version is 23.3MB. Another reason to love Micro Hexagon? The bangin’ soundtrack by Mikkel Hastrup aka Encore64.

You can download Micro Hexagon from the C-64 Scene Database for free. You can play it on your PC using a Commodore64 emulator like micro64.

[via Benjamin Wimmer via Joystiq]