NES
Image: Nintendo Life

Have you ever wished that you could display your tweets through a NES? You haven't? Well, no, neither have we... That hasn't stopped such a weird and miraculous feat from being accomplished however, and we love the outcome.

ConnectedNES, designed by Rachel Weil, is an open-source project that allows a live feed of tweets to be displayed via a NES console. It's all quite complex stuff for our feeble minds, but effectively it utilises a particle photon to 'convert' tweets into specific button presses through the NES controller.

Here's a bit more info from the creator's blog post on the project:

"When you play NES games, you press buttons on the controller, and the controller in turn sends a signal made of bits (1s and 0s) through the controller cable and into the NES console. These bits indicate which buttons were pressed or not pressed, and this information is then used to control the game. As it turns out, tweets, images, and other digital content is also made up of bits. What if we could use the controller port to stream different kinds of data into the NES? We'd have something a lot like ConnectedNES!"

The post goes on in much more detail as to how it works, so we'd recommend heading over to nobadmemories.com for a closer look at the whole process and how you can replicate it yourselves. For now, let's take a look at the feed in action:


Pretty cool, right? In terms of practicality, there's not a whole lot the project does right now, but there are apparently plans to modify the code to allow for other internet-based applications, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that!

What do you think of ConnectedNES? Fancy giving it a go yourself? Let us know!