Sometimes I wake up and find Retro Gaming news articles that make me scratch my head and pull a confused face. Yeah, it’s a little like the one you’re pulling right now, only I’m probably balder than you are and a little more tired.
The Retro Gaming community never ceases to amaze me; if you want to look for a world of creativity and ingenuity, you don’t need to look to the fantasy writers of tomorrow anymore, because modders have got some of the most fantastical minds out there.
Take James Channel, for example. Some of you might remember him as the DIY genius who made the fabled Nintendo PlayStation console by hand, but he wasn’t ever going to stop with just one creation. On his YouTube Channel, James has documented some gaming inception that takes a minute to get your head around, turning a NES cartridge into a working console that not only plays other NES games… but also one that plays itself.
A Console, Within A Game, Within A Console, Within A…
As found by our friends at Tom’s Hardware this week, James took modding into a whole new realm by making a NES cartridge do things it could never dream of. And, because it can play itself, this cartridge hasn’t been destroyed entirely, so there’s no need to grab some angry banners and pitchforks before marching on his workshop.
The cartridge that was chosen for this extremely complicated procedure was Open Tournament Golf. It’s not a game that you’ll find in everyone’s favourite NES games compendium, it has to be said, and maybe James chose it because it looked a little ‘worse for wear’ and needed some Steve Rogers style ‘beefing up’ in order to realise its true potential.
The Tools Of The Trade
AliExpress usually serves up weird and wonderful copies of game consoles that, in all honesty, are a little disappointing. But, after hacking one to pieces, James has made it much more exciting.
As you can see from the still above, there is so much empty space in a NES cartridge, something that James puts down to futureproofing, and also because they just look cool super tall.
Watching James snipping out controller ports and drilling down through the casing ‘getting close to the motherboard’ makes for tense viewing, especially when saying things like ‘if I accidentally scrape the ones on either side it makes my life a lot harder’ while using a blade on the motherboard.
Of course, if you’ve watched James’ videos before, you’ll know that he’s no stranger to a mini circular saw, His precision is incredible even when hacking at parts to get to the place he needs to be. This isn’t for the novice modder, however; this guy is a professional.
What James creates in the end is truly remarkable; a NES cartridge that uses the original controller ports from the knock-off console that is powered by Micro USB and that can still fit inside a normal Nintendo Entertainment System console to play the game that it still houses.
And, just to prove that I wasn’t lying when I said it was gaming inception, here’s a still from the very end of the video showing the game playing itself. My mind has well and truly been blown!
