Our first mod is a relatively recent one. The modder took a nice, fully functioning Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge, gutted it, and turned it into an admittedly clean and portable NES emulator. Sure, the gutting made most of my 1986 memories fade into a terrifying pit of blackness, but at least this wasn't a golden Legend of Zelda cartridge or anything.

Christ! That's ugly. But pimpin' ain't easy, so we'll give it a break. Unfortunately for me, my psyche receives no such break, and I am reduced to but two hearts, and my Master Sword no longer shoots laser beams.

The greatest platformer ever created by human hands, now a lowly 160GB USB drive. When will the insanity end?

Never, apparently. A mere month before the Super Mario Bros. 3 USB "creation" came to light, someone took a classic Game Boy, removed everything in it that made it a timeless piece of video game lore, and replaced it with a hard drive. Half a heart left, and there's this incessant beeping in my ears. Jack needs food, badly.

When I grip an NES control pad in my hands, its hard edges digging unforgivably into the soft flesh, I go to my happy place. When modder Taylor Merrill does the same, he hears the theme song from Sanford and Son. He also hears friends and relatives because he managed to get a Samsung Eternity phone into the controller that defined a generation of early console gamers. Good for you all. My childhood just ran into a goomba, jumped straight up into the air, and fell off the screen.

A lot, apparently. To actually play games on this SNEGENES P portable, you have to jam actual cartridges into the back of the portable.

It's not an issue for collectors, obviously, but in this day and age of cheap emulators it seems a bit excessive. Let's see a lite version.

Note: The modder recorded the demo video incorrectly. This system doesn't actually play games in reverse. [Ben Heck Forums via Technabob]

Confession: I always thought Mario was pixelated because he was made of Lego bricks himself. [MOCOlympics via Brothers Brick]

There's also an mp3 player, movie player and an FM radio receiver. The video out is also intact, meaning this little guy can be used to play on the big screen.

Games in action below:

To answer your question, yes, this mod is very similar to one we've featured before. This one is cleaner, boasts more features, and plays Game Boy games too, so it gets the nod today. Nice work.

Oh, and the answer to the headline question, by the way, is unicorns. They would exist. [Ben Heck Forums via technabob]

You see, the code in this case is one of the most well-known codes in all of video game history. The Konami Code. Hell, even God knows it.

Again, there's no real security here, but in any event it's miles ahead of what most people use to secure things that are really important to them. [8Bit Fix - Thanks, Gusto]

The strangest thing is that you have to modify your NES to be able to connect it, and the thing has a telephone jack built-in.

The cartridge was created for the 1991 Nintendo Campus Challenge, which travelled around 60 college campuses. It contains a minigame version of Super Mario Brothers 3, another of Pin*Bot, and a minigame version of Dr. Mario. In theory, it was destroyed after the event. However, it seems that this one had a hidden 1Up and survived the cartextimation.

Many years passed and, in 2006, it was bought by Rob Walters for $40 in a garage sale, alongside many other NES games that were later valued for a total of $50,000. The 1991 Nintendo Campus Challenge sold the last time for $14,000 in July 2009. [Thanks JJ]

The victim today is Super Mario Bros. 3, arguably the best platformer title in history and possibly one of the best video games ever created by mankind.

As of this writing, there is one less of these fine cartridges left in the world. The one you see here has had its guts ripped asunder, only to be replaced with a 160GB USB hard drive.

Sure, one could put thousands of Super Mario Bros. 3 ROMs inside this thing now that it contains a hard drive, but the essence—and a bit of my childhood—are gone forever. I'll be sleeping with my copy under the pillow tonight. [GeekSugar via CrunchGear]

Baseball Stars! [Twitter via GamOvr Via WTFoodge Via BuzzFeed]

Step-by-step instructions are available over at Instructables, but the end product is a tabletop Nintendo emulator with both USB ports and authentic NES plugs. Plus, since it's PC-based as opposed to NES-based, the whole thing can function as a standard computer as well.

But what would you prefer—a sleekly integrated screen with a tiny emulator PC, or a chunky, nostalgic cabinet like this one? For some reason (probably that I'm old enough to have thrown more than one birthday party in an arcade), I'd take the chunky cabinet. Then I'd kick myself as I remembered that my apartment has no space for the thing. [Instructables via gearfuse]

Also fun is the $2 app's use of the iPhone's accelerometer to pitch-bend sounds, and its ability to let you jam along with a friend—and hear what they're playing on your phone.

As you'll hear in the video below, NESynth has built-in classic sound effects (jump, fire, laser, etc), and an arpeggiator to help build up melodies using the on-screen piano keyboard.

(For the synth geeks out there: sound generation comes from 3 pulse waveforms, a triangle waveform, and white noise.) [NESynth | iTunes Store]

$31 will get you the pretty case with fake buttons, and two compartments: One for your business cards, the other one for the cards you collect. Or, alternatively, one for rolling paper, and the other one for papers with a lot of small funny pictures on them. See, I'm full of good ideas. [Geek Stuff 4 U via Akihabara News]

$25 is the only thing standing between plastic tackiness and Nintendo retro class. [Etsy via Geeky Gadgets]

How, you ask? Consider the shape of the NES controller, and think about which netbook best resembles it—yep, the Sony Vaio P. Crank out one of these covers for that oblong netbook, and all 10 Vaio P owners might be ordering one. Hell, I'd consider buying a Vaio P just to have one of those covers. Actually, not really. That was a lie. Sorry. [Flickr via In Blog We Trust]

Even his famed golden Zelda cartridge is tarnished. The word on the streets is that it's just plastic, but no one will say it to his face—a social courtesy sourced from pity, not fear.

After a brief time on top, the Pimptendo has seen the worst the world has to offer. He's a shabby, forgotten tool of another era. And now he's stooped to selling himself for $50. [ChaseTheChuckWagon via Gearfuse via HawtyMcBloggy via technabob]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Body Modification Ezine member Metal_Games either really loves the NES or really hates himself. Because he went through an hour of barbaric scarification (in which a trained professional sliced away chunks of his skin) to make his leg Konami code compatible. From his account:

The stencil went on, and we were ready to go. Starting with the lines, the pain wasn't half as bad as I'd expected. In fact, it was a breeze for the most part. It took Jeffrey, the artist, about 20 minutes to cut all the lines. A couple of deep breaths, and we went straight on to removing the skin...

I'll just add that removing skin before stopping the bleeding before cleaning the wound before living with the decision for the rest of his life was probably the hard part.

Read his full account of the experience at: {bmezine via GameDaily via GoNintendo]