Modder Trstn18 created his SNEGENES P handheld with the parts from an authentic “mini” SNES, and a Gen-X clone machine. The whole thing is set into a custom see-through case so you can see all the electronic goodness inside. While I wouldn’t necessarily call a system that’s 8.6-inches wide, 5.4-inches tall and 1-inch thick “handheld”, it’s still a pretty great mod job.

The SNEGENES P is powered by six 2600mAh batteries, which let it play for somewhere around 5 to 7 hours on a single charge. There’s also composite video and stereo audio outputs, which let Trstn play his favorite games on a TV. And yes, Virginia, it can play actual cartridges from these retro systems – unfortunately, the rear of the SNEGENES is a bit of a hot mess:

Here’s a brief video clip showing off the SNEGENES P in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Now why the video clip is backwards, I have no idea. Maybe it’s because “snegenes” sounds like a backwards chant you’d hear in a subliminal message on a Beatles record. Just hold your computer up to a mirror and you can watch it properly.

[via Ben Heck Forums]

Inspired by an earlier NESp (Ninendo Entertainment System portable) mod by darkeru, modder airz managed to put a completely playable game system, including a 2.8-inch LCD screen and original NES controller buttons into an old Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge. The broken off cartridge connector board at the bottom is nice touch, too.

Now, you may ask how he fit an entire NES inside a cartridge – the answer is simple – airz’ NESp isn’t a real Nintendo console. It’s actually one of those cheap Chinese PMPs that happens to be able to emulate NES games. But that doesn’t make it any less cool in my book. The way I figure it, that just means that he doesn’t need to carry around a bunch of other cartridges to play games. It can also play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games as an added bonus. And movies, MP3s and even receives FM radio to boot. Airz even preserved the portable’s video-out port so he can play games on a television too.

Here’s a vid clip of the Airz’ NESp in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

From the looks of the video, though, it sounds like someone needs to increase the framerate skip on their NES emulator. Mario seems to be playing just a wee bit faster than the original.

[via Ben Heck Forums]

While the PXP-2000 won’t play any of your PSP games, it will play classic games from the NES, Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Super Famicom/SNES, and SEGA Megadrive/Genesis consoles. It features a nice oversize 4.3″ LCD screen and a slide-out controller just like the PSP Go that it mimics.

In addition to playing all of those retro 8-, 16- and 32-bit games from your childhood, the PXP-2000 is a media player that can crank out your music and videos too. It can play MP3, WMA, WAV, APE, FLAC, RM-Audio, AMR, AAC+ audio formats. For video, it can handle AVI videos, but comes with transcoding software for RM, RMVB, AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, MPEG, MPE, MP4, DAT, MOV, DAT, and even the elusive, but non-existent MP5 format (it’s really just Real Media Variable Bitrate format).

The PXP is your standard jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none media player, complete with an low resolution digital video camera, FM radio, a calculator, notepad, e-book reader and English-to-Chinese dictionary.

If you’re too cheap to drop $249 on a proper PSP Go, and you really just want to play retro games anyhow, head on over to Chinagrabber and plunk down your $83.99 (USD).

The mysteriously named SP2 handheld can play games from the original NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Color, Neo Geo and yes, the Game Boy Advance. Just load your favorite ROMs (no where ever would you have gotten those from?) onto a MicroSD card, stick ‘em into the slot, and you’re all set to play all your retro classics on the SP2’s 2.4-inch LCD screen. It also claims to come with “hundred games built in”, for what that’s worth.

As an added bonus, the SP2 can play music in MP3 or WMA formats, as well as videos in RM/RMV and AVI formats. There’s also a built in voice recorder and microphone (which I’d love to see hacked to control gameplay at some point). In addition to the silver version pictured above, it’s available in both black and gold case designs, in case you’re into that sort of thing.

Of course those of you with a keen powers of observation will notice this emulator’s relative dearth of buttons. While you should be fine playing all those NES and Game Boy games, you might have trouble with SNES and Neo Geo games because those consoles had 4 buttons on the face of their controllers. That said, there are a couple of hidden shoulder buttons, but I’m not sure that will help.

Still, if you want to give one a whirl, you can grab the SP2 over on DealExtreme for $65.90(USD) each. Me, I’ll stick to playing with my Dingoo.

The E-Time Game Play Controller ($22 USD) may look like a standalone game controller, but it’s actually a self-contained SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis console. Just load your SEGA MD ROMs onto an SD memory card, plug it into the slot on the controller, and you’ll be playing Sonic, Golden Axe and your other favorite 16-bit titles on your TV. The battery-operated controller even can save games in progress if the original title supports it. You can even plug in a second controller with a standard Mega Drive/Genesis connector.

Keep in mind that this is not an officially-licensed SEGA device – just another one of those cheap Chinese gadgets that might not live up to its promises, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t play all of your ROMs. And anyhow, what are you doing with those ROMs anyway? As long as it plays Zombies Ate My Neighbors, I’m fine.

[E-Time Game Discussion Board]

Freetron’s FunPlay 20-in-1 not only can be connected to your television, but since it runs on 3-AAA batteries can be played on the road with portable DVD players (as long as they have a video input). The battery-operated circuit also makes this a perfect candidate for portable game system hackers – although the built-in 16-bit Genesis/Mega Drive emulator is limited to the 20 included games as far as I can tell.

Here’s a full list of included games: Sonic Blast, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Drift 2, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Triple Trouble, Alex Kidd High Tech World, Alex Kidd The Lost Stars, Altered Beast, Astro Warrior, Bomber Raid, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Ecco The Tides of Time, Fantasy Zone, Golden Axe, Penguin Land, Psycho Fox, Quartet, Ristar, and Super Columns.

You can grab one of these over at DealExtreme for just under $15 (USD). With 20 fully licensed SEGA games for that price, this thing looks like a pretty great deal. I think I paid $159 bucks for my original Genesis, and that was before I bought a single game.

Of course, if you don’t need to take it on the road, and you’ve got a PS3 or Xbox 360, you owe it to yourself to check out Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection instead – which includes twice as many games for just $28 (USD).

The ported program still doesn’t have a user interface, but it’s working alright. Or not. I leave it up to you to decide if the demo below is indeed running on a 360. +1 to anyone who tells me the artist of the awesome chiptune playing in the background.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

This is actually the first time that I’ve heard of a homebrew program, much less an emulator, for Microsoft’s latest console. Even though I don’t have my own Xbox 360, I’m still interested. More videos – with concrete proof  – and a how-to please tmbinc!

But unlike any emulator I have ever heard of, OpenEmu treats these video game systems as plugins. Not only that, you can play with several ROMs at the same time, as shown in the picture above. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of awesome that is OpenEmu.

The window on the left is where you insert, activate and connect plugins. If you’re a fan of DAWs, think of Reason; OpenEmu’s kinda like that. If you’ve never used Reason, you’re missing out on a lot. And watch this video to get an idea of how OpenEmu works (and so to a small extent, Reason as well):

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I know right? WTF and FTW mashed into one. It’s kinda like a retro and trippy LittleBigPlanet, where you can fiddle around with what you’re given and create something else entirely. You can synchronize music with the effects and make a video out of a NES game in real time with just a press of a button. No meddling with video software needed.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

If you’re not into multimedia and you just wanna fiddle with games, OpenEmu can help you with that too.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Who knows what else you can do with this thing? I mean we certainly didn’t expect what 2 girls can do with just 1 cup. Check out Peter Kirn’s article at Create Digital Motion for more details on OpenEmu, vade and Dan Winckler’s Vimeo accounts for more vids, or just wing it, download the emulator, and mess games up right frakkin now! *ahem* currently Mac only.

[via Retro Thing]

Written by Brendan Fletcher (aka “calc84maniac”), TI-Boy SE is a Game Boy emulator that runs on TI’s Z-80 based graphing calculators thanks to similarities between the CPUs of the two systems. The emulator includes three zoom modes, two sprite tracking modes, grayscale or black-and-white palettes, two-channel sound and even can save and load games. Right now it only supports a handful of games, including Tetris, Zelda – Link’s Awakening and Kirby along with homebrew games. Emulation speed is a bit choppy, but what do you expect for an Alpha 0.0.2 version number. I’m sure that TI-Boy will only get better and faster with time.

Here’s a video of an early build of TI-Boy SE running Link’s Awakening in all its greyscale glory…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

If you’ve got a TI-8x calculator, head on over to GameboyDev and grab the installer. There’s plenty of good discussion going on over on the Omnimaga forums too.

[via Ben Heck Forums]

Mounting Debian on the Pre is one thing, but typing a command in the damn chroot before and after playing a game? Good god. And just to rub rock salt onto our fresh, fresh wounds, they made a demo video too. *sniff* ‘Snot fair.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

On second thought, I actually don’t care because I can easily have NES, SNES, GBA and PSX emulators on my PSP all at the same time. Ha! Take that chroot.

[via CrunchGear]

However, the exploit is still in development and has limited functionality. Unlike the hacks for the PSP-1000 and PSP-2000, the HEN TIFF exploit does not allow installation of custom firmware, won’t allow a PSP-3000 to play backups of PSP or PSX games (such as those in .ISO and .CSO formats), load plugins or “touch the flash” of a PSP. That last one sounded a bit dirty. Anyway, Here’s the video of a PSP with 5.03 firmware booting on the HEN environment:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

While the HEN exploit still has no PSP/PSX backup support, it can be used to run emulators – such as the GBA emulator gPSP, pictured below – as well as other homebrew games and programs, such as the well-known PSPTube.

Head on to Davee’s website for more details on ChickHEN. You can also download the hack on his website, but make sure that a.) you’re running firmware version 5.03 and b.) you absolutely know what you’re doing, because if you break your PSP you only have yourself to blame. Hackers don’t offer no warranty; they break ‘em.

[via Slashdot]

While the PXP-900 steals more thant a few of it’s design cues from the Sony PSP, don’t expect it to play the latest PSP games – it only plays retro game ROMs. The system is the latest and greatest cheapie jack-of-all-trades media player, digicam, audio book reader, FM radio, gaming combo system fresh from the streets of China.

The handheld runs an emulator that can play NES, Famicom, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Super Famicom, SEGA MegaDrive and  some sort of 32-bit ROM games too (although the product description doesn’t elaborate). And while most retro games are built for a 4:3 screen ratio, it looks like the console works some sort of stretchy magic to make games play on its 4.3″ widescreen 16:9 LCD.

So if you’re willing to take a gamble on one of these questionable mutant consoles, you can find the PXP-900 over at Chinagrabber for $89.99 (USD).

In addition to playing a wide variety of audio and video formats on its 320×240 LCD screen, the GAME-800 PMP has a software emulator on board that lets it play NES, Famicom, GameBoy, GameBoy Color and Sega Mega Drive games. And when you’re not playing games, there’s a text-to-speech eBook reader that can read any TXT file out loud in either Chinese or English. There’s also a handy digital camera built in, although the specs don’t say anything about the resolution – so I wouldn’t expect much in terms of photo quality.

The GAME-800 comes with 4GB of onboard storage, and can be expanded up to 8GB total using an optional SD memory card. Now I’m not sure that I’m in love with the design of this thing – it sorta looks like what might have happened if your iPhone was made out of plastic, then got squashed in a table vise, and coated in day glo paint. It’s also lacking a real gamepad, so control is limited to using four ergonomically-unfriendly buttons to control directional movements.

Still, if you’re looking for a cheap media player with a full color screen, and want to play your retro games (and know what rocks to dig under to find game ROMs), it’s not a bad deal for just $80 smackeroonies over at ChinaGrabber.

[via TFTS]

But the result looks great and it gets the job done–the job, in this case, being playing Famicom games, which is pretty important–so who am I to quibble over details about appearances?

Modder goteking seems to have a fascination with Famicom cartridges; he’s been in this space before for his excellent Famicam, a camera inside a cartridge. What will he stick in a cart next?

[via BenHeck.com forums]

Software Engineer Michael Lauer recently released SID Player, which emulates the 6581 SID audio circuit from the C64. Of course, what’s a sound chip emulator without tunes? SID Player has you covered, providing on-the-go access to a collection of over 33,000 C64 music tracks by linking up with HVSC – the High Voltage SID Collection.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Enjoy classics like Commando, Arkanoid and Yie Ar Kung Fu, along with thousands of original chiptunes by over 1,100 contributors. Each SID sound file only takes up a few K of your memory, and the files are tiny enough to be quickly downloaded over an EDGE or 3G connection, so fill ‘er up!

SID Player is available now from the iTunes App Store for $2.99 (USD), which according to my math, works out to be way, way, way less than a penny a tune.

[via electrobeans]

Mac modder Napes took an original bondi blue iMac, built it into a custom cocktail-format arcade cabinet, and transformed it into a full-fledged arcade gaming system. Thanks to the scan lines on the iMac’s bubbly 15″ color CRT, it’s the perfect display for that retro arcade feel.

The arcadiMac runs on a 233MHz PowerPC 750 (G3) processor, which may not seem like much by today’s standards, but it’s plenty powerful to run most classic arcade games (other then NEOGEO) using MacMame emulator software.

To get all the real arcade buttons and joysticks to work with the iMac, Napes wired them through an iPac USB controller interface, and set up all the key mappings with QuickKeys. The total cost for the entire project was under $200 bucks (plus several months of blood, sweat and tears).

Ready to build your own arcadiMac? Napes plans on posting a build guide over on MacMod so you can make one for yourself.

Created by modder Sam Thornley, the portable Pac-Man Mini console gets its brains from one of those Jakks Pacific Namco Arcade Classic systems, seamlessly melded with a tiny 2.5-inch LCD display and powered by a set of 4 rechargeable AA batteries for easy travel.

While the screenshot photos below look a bit blurry, Sam assures us that the screen is actually very sharp thanks to a direct composite video connection to the Jakks circuit.

Besides Pac-Man, the chunky portable system can play Galaxian, Rally-X, Bosconian, and my personal arcade version of crack, Dig Dug.

The only thing left out of the portable console is a sound system. That’s because those Namco “arcade on a chip” systems that run those Jakks systems don’t offer the exact same sounds that the original versions played, and Sam is clearly an arcade purist.

Sure, I suppose Sam could have just gone an grabbed a copy of Namco Museum for the Nintendo DS, GBA or Sony PSP, but what fun would that have been?

[via Ben Heck Forums]

In addition to playing your MP3s and MP4s, the Media Street eMotion EM-SOL2GIG media player offers compatibility with NES/Famicom, GameBoy, GameBoy Color and SEGA Mega Drive (aka the Genesis stateside). Of course, that assumes you’ve got an idea of where to find some ROM files (hmm, ever heard of Google?) And when you’re done playing games, you can get some culture thanks to a text-to-speech E-book reader capability that can read any TXT file in either Chinese or English. It offers 2GB of on-board storage, plus an SD slot for memory expansion.

The portable console offers a 320×240 color display, and measures in at 5.5″ wide x 3″ high x 1″ thick – with most of the heft coming from the fold-out solar panels. The large solar panel not only charges the player’s internal battery, it can provide emergency juice to other portable gadgets such as mobile phones and digital cameras.

You can find the EM-SOL2GIG over on Amazon for $169.99 USD.

(BTW, this player looks awfully similar to this other solar game system, but that one makes no claims of SEGA emulation).

Imaging hooking up this plain-Jane NES to your television, turning it on for your friends, and starting to play games from not only the NES, but from the SNES, N64 and other retro consoles with a flick of the joypad. That’s exactly what modder cbutters managed to do when he gutted this old NES and stuffed it with the brains of a modern PC. The system runs on an Intel mini-ITX mobo, which is plenty powerful to run retro game emulators at optimal speeds.

Even the old NES controller ports have been rewired to work via the PC’s USB system. The modded console hides a four-port USB hub that snaps neatly into the original NES expansion port on the bottom, allowing a variety of non-NES controllers to be connected with ease. And to really keep the retro feel, the console can only connect via composite video, preserving that old-school blurry image quality that’ll some older games relied on to conceal their graphical flaws. See the system in action in the video clip below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

To see exactly how cbutters managed to get the system inside the NES without nary a hint from the outside, check out the build log over on Exoid.

[Exoid via Ben Heck Forums]

Created by China’s Eittek Electronics, the 9800 MiWi video game system comes with a pair of wireless controllers which do their best to mock Wii-motes. Heck, even the logotype on the packaging looks strikingly similar to the Wii’s.

But these guys didn’t stop at swiping their ideas from current-gen Nintendo consoles. Notice how the MiWi’s joystick bears more than a passing resemblance to the classic N64 controller (in white)?

The MiWi claims to play WiiSports-esque games including boxing, ping pong, tennins, golf, baseball, soccer and bowling, but from the look of the cartridges it includes, don’t count on anything more than a retro 16-bit gaming experience. The best news about the MiWi is that it packs in a whopping 23 games in the box, so your chances of them all sucking equally are reduced. Then again, I’ve been wrong before.

If you’re really dying to get your hands on one of these oddities, good luck. Brush up on your Chinese, and head on over to TV Sportsgame.