When I first saw the photos of this thing, I actually thought it was some sort of wedding cake. But hiding beneath the Princess Peach’s castle shell is a fully-functional Nintendo 64 console.

The castle design really does look like the original 3D Princess’ castle in Super Mario 64 – except you can look all the way around this one without fumbling to use the camera on your controller – and the texture maps are better on this one.

According to the eBay listing, “the exterior of the castle has been molded to look like the bricks and roof tiles, then painted. The mural of Princess Peach is a very detailed mosaic and the five flags are made of cloth.” The modder also managed to maintain all of the original ventilation, even when the top half of the castle is put in place.

If you can believe it, this thing was on eBay for 10 days, and after a dozen bids already has sold to one very lucky bidder for just $100 bucks. I bet they could have sold it for lots more if they had only waited for me to report on it

[via Pixfans]

Artist Christopher Locke crafts these not-fossils from concrete and more to create that realistic look, but the best part has to be the names he assigns the projects. The n64 controller? Dominaludus sexagentaquad. Sounds pretty important for something I used until I thought my thumbs would fall off on GoldenEye 007.

While some newer, slicker technologies are featured, like the iPod, Locke didn’t forget the oldschool roots of portable gadgetry. It’s the boom box, folks, or as he puts it, bombus colaphus.

The fossils are all for sale, but be warned that art from the future does not come cheap.

[Christopher Locke via Hawty McBloggy and Wonderland]

The N64 never looked so good in green before! But it’s not just any green, but Zelda green. After all, the N64 is home to the fan-renowned title The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.

Oh… well–Majora’s Mask is pretty good, too.

This portable system is less than eight inches wide, which means it’s wider than a Nintendo DS, but not quite so long as the PlayStation Portable. At 1.5 inches thick, that’s truly a tiny N64! It’ll even take the expansion pack.

[via BenHeck.com forums]

BenHeck.com forumite SifuF cut away half the size of the original N64 and added a headphone jack to perfect this handheld design. Cartridges slip elegantly into the back of this compact console. It’s so small, however, that there’s no room for internal batteries; when you want to play, you’ve got rely on external power. The sacrifices we make for size.

I guess it’s pretty on the inside, if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s the Nintendo Sixtyfree Lite-R without its clothes on:

[BenHeck.com forums via Hack a Day]

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]