[Erick Kwiecien via Make]

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]

The console guitar’s are nothing new to the internet, but an NES guitar of this calibre—one in which even the headstock has been replaced with a cartridge—is a rarity indeed. Hit 2:20 for the demo. [TechEBlog via GadgetReview]

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]

The “security code” installed on this NES controller flash storage mod isn’t going to keep anyone from accessing the files inside, but that’s not really the point:

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 $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]

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]