Category: DIY + Hacks

Always thought you could improve on the gameplay of Tetris? Fancy yourself the creator of the next Super Mario Brothers? Thanks to this open source gaming system – if you’ve got the programming chops, you’ve got the chance to make the next great 8-bit video game.

Looking to add a splash of color to your Mac Mini without losing the aluminum finish? Well here’s a new way to add a serious splash of color to your Mini. The guys over at Computer Choppers are now offering a custom Mac Mini anodizing service, letting you really give your computer a new look.

Steampunk-inspired computers and accessories are becoming popular themes for modders, and even so, this particular keyboard stands apart thanks to the sheer creativity of the approach. Also? Plaid. Who doesn’t like plaid? Gone is the dark, brassy look of most of the steampunk mods we’ve seen; Markus’s keyboard is old, battered and faded, but still noble somehow.

Here’s what this looks like: a workable, playable Famicom cartridge modded to contain an entire Famicom. But oh how deceiving looks can be. Really, this is a Yinlips media player with a Famicom emulator stuffed into a business card holder shaped like a Famicom cart.

Mods and hacks aren’t always about looking good; often the more clever and crafty individuals among us will bend their minds to  making something more versatile in order to fill a need. In this case, a wheelchair-bound Guitar Hero enthusiast needed to find a way to circumvent the kick pedal on the World Tour drum set.

In this case, no one can hear you scream. The Alien Assimilation Playstation 3 casemod is definitely going to give me nightmares tonight. I’m not really sure what’s going on in there, but it couldn’t possibly be good.

At first glance, I thought this seafaring sports car was the underwater Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me. Much to my amazement, it’s a real amphibious Lamborghini Countach built by Mike Ryan of SeaRoader.

It’s been a good few years for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not many teams have racked up two Super Bowl victories in such a short time. So what can we do to celebrate the team? Ogle a Steelers casemod, of course.

No matter how beautiful (or in this case, large) a gaming console, it an almost always be improved upon in some way. In this particular case, the marriage of two classics has produced one harmonious construction that provides everything you need to get your Dreamcast on… and it’s all packaged up like an iMac.

Some people go in for a regular ol’ security system, the kind with panels and codes and alarms. And you could do that, sure. Or, you could put together some real home security: a paintball turret.

It’s becoming quite normal for amazing DIY portable systems to pop up everywhere. If it can play games, someone’s going to try to make it portable, and the Nintendo 64 is one of the most popular candidates for such projects.

Inspired by a scene from an old British TV sitcom, modder/appliance frankenstein lemonie decided to make a real vhs toaster. He succeeded and failed at the same time. Which is kind of a feat in itself.

Want a small Mac, but like the look of the beefy aluminum Mac Pro tower? Too impatient to wait for Apple to make a metal Mac Mini, this one modder decided to craft his own. While not running on official Apple hardware, the Hackintosh Jr.

This could be my favorite Mac Mini mod yet. Take one part retro Apple Disk ][ drive and one part Mac Mini, and what do you get? A little bit of casemodding genius. Modder Charles Mangin took the guts out of his old Disk ][ enclosure and managed to find a way to squeeze the innards of a Mac Mini inside the case.

Have you ever loaded up a retro arcade game with MAME, only to be greeted with an error message about those bad ROMs you downloaded 2 years ago? Well one enterprising developer decided to take that idea and actually turn it into a game.

After listening to his startup sound, I always figured that Wall-E ran on Mac OS. I guess I was wrong. From the looks of this casemod, the little yellow robot that could runs Windows XP. Modder Jonathan Berg put together this Wall-E PC mod that comes complete with a 7-inch touchscreen monitor inside his belly.