He picked up this old Nintendo 64 at a flea market for about 20 bucks, then gutted it to provide the shell for his new home theater PC. Since his main goal was to build a wireless PC for his living room to stream media and surf the internet from, he didn’t go for the most powerful computer, instead going for something that would fit neatly inside the chassis of the N64.

He decided to go with a Zotac ION ITX motherboard, which conveniently crams sound, graphics, CPU, GPU, Wi-Fi, and HDMI and optical outputs on a single compact board. It’s based on the nVidia ION chipset, and runs an Intel Atom N330 CPU. He wanted the box to be dead silent, so he even went with a 30GB solid state drive for storage. While he originally had hoped he could run fanless, he had to keep a small fan in there to prevent the CPU from overheating. Still, it’s way better than anything I could do.

Polvorito has actually installed OSX on the mutant N64, making it the first official Nintendo 64-based Hackintosh I’ve seen. You can check out the full work log over at The Best Case Scenario.

On the other hand, I don’t think we can really say that the smartphone was “running” OSX. It was more like crawling:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I was half-expecting to see the phone explode or melt down. Still goes to show that today’s portable devices can be powerful enough to install a “full” operating system. Obviously the interface needs to be modified, but a full OS does give you legit web browsing, multitasking, and you’ll be able to browse your files and folders *hint hint*.

[via Make:]

The Mac version has a metal case and a 2-liner LCD screen like its software counterpart, while the Windows calculator sports the classic XP color scheme, and even has menu headers. I know that these are just concepts, but what would the window buttons (maximize, minimize, close) be for in a real calculator? It would be awesome if you could actually maximize a real calculator though.

The designer is aware of the fact that it would be unlikely for either Apple or Microsoft to let any third party get away with making these calculators, so is leaving it up to the two computer makers to make real-life versions of their OS calculators, if only to give away as gifts or for marketing gimmicks. And if they decide to go ahead with it, maybe they should contact Mintpass.

Mac modder Charles Mangin really did an amazing job seamlessly integrating Macs from both the 20th and 21st centuries. At first glance, the machine looks like a stock Mac Plus, but look closer and you’ll see all the detail work that Charles did, like adding a hidden Superdrive (from an iMac G5), a pair of USB ports underneath, as well as a third one tucked away behind a sliding door inside the floppy drive slot.

Thanks to improvements in miniaturization, all of the newer technology fit neatly inside the old case, leaving plenty of room to spare.

He even went so far as to swap out the innards of an old Mac ADB mouse with a modern optical USB one.

The Frankenstein’s monster of a machine is nicknamed “Marvin” after the paranoid robot Marvin from The Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. If you want to see more of how Marvin came to be, check out photos of  entire build over on Charles’ Flickr album. (The mouse mod is documented separately here).

Now all we need is to figure out a way to cram this whole thing inside a Commodore PET, and we’ll be all set.

[via MacMod]