Gizmodo Australia » cartridges

One-Of-A-Kind Nintendo Cartridge Fetches Highest Price Yet

Jesus Diaz — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:40:00 +0000

Only one of these Nintendo cartridges exist in the world, which is why it has beaten the $US17,500 gold 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge. The new record: $US20,400. However, its price is not the strangest thing about it.

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 $US40 in a garage sale, alongside many other NES games that were later valued for a total of $US50,000. The 1991 Nintendo Campus Challenge sold the last time for $US14,000 in July 2009. [Thanks JJ]

Cartridges For Planet Ark Collects 10,000,000th Cartridge

Nick Broughall — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:30:33 +0000

In the seven years its been running, Planet Ark has recycled 10 million printer ink cartridges. That’s about 4700 tonnes of waste that didn’t go straight to landfill. That’s a pretty good effort, but I reckon we can do better.

Because of the plastics and metals in printer cartridges, they take a long time to break down in landfill. But they can be relatively easily recycled, either being reused by printer manufacturers or recycled into new products.

To find the nearest place to recycle your cartridges, point your browser at cartridges.planetark.org. It may take a little bit of extra effort, but it has a real benefit for the environment, so you should do it anyway.

[Planet Ark]

Retro-Gen Plays Dusty Old Sega Genesis Cartridges And Digital ROMs

Dan Nosowitz — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:00:00 +0000

We’ve seen reimagined Genesises (Geneses?) before, but this might be the best one yet. It’s portable, it plays both original cartridges and ROMS off an SD card, it’s got TV-out and it only costs $US50. Sign us up.

The Retro-Gen (branded Sega, though we can’t imagine Sega actually had anything to do with it) features a USB-rechargeable battery and comes pre-loaded with 20 “classic” games (we’re not sure what they are, hence the quotes). It says it’ll only play licensed ROMs, though who knows what that means; we’d imagine you can just load it up with whatever you’ve got. It doesn’t look like it has an extra port for another controller, which would come in handy for multiplayer games using the handheld’s TV-out, but you can’t have everything, right? It’s available for pre-order now, for a $US50, $US10 off the usual price. [Video Game Central via The Mirror]

The Ecofont Cuts Ink Consumption by 20%

Mark Wilson — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:40:00 +0000

The creators of Ecofont want to save you ink by drilling tiny holes in your print. Good idea?

Well, while it’s free to download and use, Treehugger’s testing found that the Ecofont, though readable, really just prints the text lighter. In our guesstimation, you could probably recreate the ink savings of Ecofont by printing your materials in draft mode instead. Plus, that way you can choose the whichever font you like.

But should you be so bold as to print Ecofont in draft mode? Existence would cease as we know it. [Ecofont via Treehugger]

This NES Cartridge Now Stores 250GB of Anything

Mark Wilson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:00:00 +0000

To the modern modder, the NES cartridge is a tool as versatile as a Swiss Army Knife, or maybe one of those blade-things that fits in the credit card slot of one’s wallet. Regardless, the NES-Box is an NES cartridge stuffed with a 2.5″ 250GB SATA drive. Connecting to any computer via USB, the drive needs additional power to operate. And the best part? This baby is actually on sale for $US180. We find it hard to believe that the one in stock hasn’t been purchased yet, but maybe if you ask the Etsy seller real nice, they’ll fashion another just for you. [Etsy via ubergizmo]

Xerox Solid Ink Looks Like a Crayon, Feels Like Plastic

Mark Wilson — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:40:00 +0000

Over at NextFest, we came across an entire tree’s worth of Xerox’s cartridge-less solid ink, a technology we’d heard about but never seen in person. They feel more like a hard, textured plastic than a waxy crayon (which is its most touted analogy), and the ink doesn’t rub off in your hand at all. And yes, Xerox, we’ll be happy to buy your product that reduces ink waste by 90% if you’d kindly release it to the market.

Famicase Exhibition Fuses Yesterday’s Famicom Cartridges With Today’s Curious Artistic Minds

Jack Loftus — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Rounding out our Nintendo news trifecta today is the annual Famicase art exhibition. It’s like many other art exhibitions from around the world, made infinitely cooler by the fact that the artwork is comprised of imaginary games pasted to old 8-bit Famicom carts. More than 50 designers, illustrators and authors contributed to event this year, which is organised by Super Meteor game shop owner Satoshi Sagagami. Some are crazier than others, but all have a home in this Nintendo lover’s heart. Personal favourite? Overly promiscuous R.O.B.–now we know what he’s been up to all these years!

[Famicase via Technabob]