A Minecraft player is building the entire Zelda: Breath of the Wild map

Minecraft and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are two great tastes, but do they taste great together? One Minecraft player is making an argument for ‘yes’ with a massive project to rebuild the entire map from Nintendo’s modern classic as a playable Minecraft survival map. It’s still in progress, but the results are already impressive.

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RaspberryPi Mod Recreates Authentic Game Boy Feel

DMGPlus, another Game Boy replicator. A wondrous labor of love!

Taking a Raspberry Pi and sticking it in the housing of a Game Boy isn’t a new project, though most of these retrofits were undoubtedly more modern than the original handheld console. They usually had more buttons, backlit color TFTs, and ran off modern Li-ion batteries. A project on Spritesmods named the DMGPlus is interested in utilizing the Pi in a stealthier way; instead of using it to update the older console, the DMGPlus is recreating how playing one of the first handheld game consoles used to feel.

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How Nintendo Failed Into Super Mario Kart | The Story Behind The Super Nintendo Classic

Super Mario Kart went on to become a 16-bit classic and one of the best selling Super Nintendo games of all time. But Super Mario Kart’s origins didn’t even start as a Mario game. From an unsucessful two player F-Zero game to one of Nintendo’s longest running franchises, this is the story of how Nintendo failed into Super Mario Kart.

Gameboy Color Gets a Rechargeable Battery

Nintendo’s classic Game Boy has long been the darling queen of the handheld scene. However, with many fans modifying their handhelds with power-sucking features like modern backlit LCDs, running on AA batteries can become a frustrating exercise as they rapidly run out. [esotericsean] gets around that by modifying his Game Boys with a USB rechargeable battery setup. (Video, embedded below.)

The hack is a simple one, but the execution is quite tidy. [esotericsean] starts by removing the original DC jack from the Game Boy motherboard, and hogs out the hole in the case to fit a micro USB port. The original battery housing is similarly carved out to suit a 2000 mAh lithium-polymer pouch cell. A single-cell charging board is used to manage the battery, with its original connector removed and replaced with a neater-looking panel mount micro USB port instead. The electronics is then wrapped up in Kapton tape and stuffed inside the shell as everything is put back together.

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This Game Boy Cartridge Has Its Own OLED Screen

FacelessTech built this Game Boy cartridge that shows the game title on a small OLED screen.

The original Nintendo Game Boy is now more than 30 years old, but it still has an active community of enthusiasts who make new hardware or modify existing hardware. That includes people who make new game cartridges. To make those, they use “repro” (short for “reproduction”) PCBs that contain re-flashable chips and Game Boy-compatible edge connectors. FacelessTech noticed that those PCBs are quite compact and built a shortened Ghost Cart that is about half the height of a standard cartridge. For his newest project, he used that extra space to add an OLED screen to a Game Boy cartridge.

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This Modder Converted a Virtual Boy Into a Handheld Console

Shank Mods used a real motherboard to build what is likely the world’s first Virtual Boy handheld console.

We’re lucky to have access to several high-quality virtual reality (VR) headsets today. But there were several attempts at VR in the past. A handful of rather gimmicky VR systems were setup in malls and video arcades, but Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was the first console capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D graphics. It was also a massive flop. Nintendo only sold 770,000 Virtual Boy units, compared to more than 32 million units for the Nintendo 64 that hit the market just a year later. Despite their rarity, Shank Mods managed to get a broken Virtual Boy motherboard. He used that to build what is likely the world’s first Virtual Boy handheld console.

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The most overused game graphic you never noticed | Texture Archaeology

The exact same brick texture is in dozens of Nintendo 64 and PlayStation games. From Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and Final Fantasy 7, to Turok, Conker, and Mortal Kombat 3.

“cobble_stone” is the most overused game graphic you never noticed. Why were competing studios sharing the same graphics? ‘Texture Archaeology’ gives us the answer. The cartoonish, magical imagery from your childhood is a lot more realistic than you once thought.