Meet the portable Famicom that looks like an old-school Walkman

A modder has devised a new way of playing the original Super Mario Bros. with a portable Famicom of their own creation. Although it is neither the first nor the last conversion of a Famicom/NES to becoming a portable console, this one has the peculiarity that its design is a hybrid between a Game Boy and a Walkman due to its lateral insertion system for the cassette-style cartridges.

This is the portable Famicom that looks like a Walkman

Twitter/X user limonegongbang has surprised the retro community with their new creation: a Famicom conversion to a portable game console with a backlit screen. And if that were not enough, this smart design reminds of the walkman, with a lateral cartridge insertion system reminiscent of how we put the cassettes in the classic music devices.

This is not just an aesthetic conversion., being fully functional and allowing you to play the entire Famicom catalog on the go. The modder has uploaded a video to their YouTube channel (with English subtitles available) detailing the entire process in case someone with sufficient knowledge of electronics dares to imitate him:

What they did is as follows: remove the Famicom motherboard and attach a 3.5-inch LCD screen. Make a custom case using 3D printing. For the buttons, they used the ones from an original Famicom control and also included two extra buttons for autofire mode, which in games like Contra allows you to shoot continuously by simply holding it down. He also added a battery that charges via a USB-C port at the bottom, and an audio jack to connect headphones.

It is a portable console conversion of the original Famicom, whose cartridges were significantly smaller in size than those of the NES that reached the rest of the world. In other words: The portable versions of the NES that have appeared over the years are either bulkier than this portable Famicom or the cartridges simply attach to the console. with no way to hide them inside the machine casing.

Full screen

Curiously, the size of the cartridge motherboards did not take up the entire huge casing of the Western NES cartridges; its increase in size and change in shape and color was a deliberate design decision from Nintendo America to differentiate its games from those of the Atari family consoles and thus prevent them from relating to the infamous crash of 83.

In any case, this homemade portable console is a small engineering marvel that serves to give, effectively, a second life to a dilapidated Famicom which this Internet user bought at a second-hand store for just 500 yen. Most purists will think that this is a little short of sacrilege and that the ideal would have been to restore the original console, but it doesn’t hurt to let creativity fly to come up with new consoles that could have been and that weren’t. It remains to be seen if it is the same kind of “indestructible” as the official Nintendo consoles.