I don’t want to say that ILM and Weta did a bad job on Avatar’s visual effects, but an Atari 2600 edition of Avatar would still get most of the point across. [ Penney Design via GameSetWatch via Kotaku ]

I love this 8-bit wedding invitation. Not only for the design, but because it not-so-subtly portrays marriage as a prolonged Street Fighter match. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against marriage. And if you’ve got a wife awesome enough to agree to an invitation like this, it’ll probably be pretty smooth sailing from here on out. But let’s face it, there’ll be times where verbal Hadouken’s are thrown. So why not acknowledge that with an awesome wedding invitation?

As mind control toys, games and electronics position themselves to become the big ticket items of the holiday season, we children of the 80s can just sit back and smile, content with the knowledge that we’ve seen it all before. But for you younger types, Boing Boing has a run down of this season’s big brain games . From Star Wars to neural mice, they’re all here, ready to move and impress with nothing but the power of thought. Well, not exactly. As BB’s Rob Beschizza notes, the same primitive control schemes of the 1980s are somewhat in place with these crude toys as well.

A crazy British engineer named Iain Sharp decided to honor the 40th anniversary of the moon landing by building a real-life version of the classic Atari game Lunar Lander . And you know what? It’s pretty great. Built using a pair of old PCs, some fishing wire, inkjet printer motors, spools and little lander models.

These Atari wallets are half awesome, half impractical. I mean, they’re retro cool and all, but who wants to sit on a plastic cartridge? [ NilesZ ]

With the help of a GameCube power supply and the malleable magic hands of master modder Ben Heck , one lucky client can now play Buck Rogers and other classics on a positively portable Atari 800 laptop. As Ben notes in the video, it’s really the vintage Atari keyboard that sells this thing. The clickity clack is unmistakable, soothing and flashback inducing all in one—he even managed to get the thing to pop up at near the same angle as the original! Some more specs, courtesy Ben’s web site: - Base unit is Atari XEGS motherboard, as usual. - XE 130 RAM expansion built-in. - Uses MyIDE circuitry and custom OS ROM to use a 2.5″ PATA hard drive. Very fast! You can check out Mr Atari’s site here

After the first Pong cabinet was placed in Andy Capp’s Cavern in 1972, video games exploded, reaching their full stride by the late ’70s. Here are some of the notable games/systems you played (or would have played) back then: Duck Hunt (1976) Before Duck Hunt hit the NES as part of the most famous (and arguably most successful) gaming bundle of all time, Nintendo released a version of the game as a standalone toy. A revamp of their IR-based Laser Clay Shooting System! (1973), Duck Hunt used a battery powered lightgun and projector to fly ducks randomly around your wall. Tastefully, there was no little dog there to laugh at you when you inevitably ran out of batteries. [See Duck Hunt in action here ] The Atari 2600 (1977) Parents may hate consoles now, but the Atari 2600 was greeted with open arms by parents who were happy to keep their kids safe at home rather than exploring seedy arcades

Well, kids, if you like your USB drives with a little style, a little kitsch, and far too large to be carried conveniently, a gentleman named Robotic Evil, Inc. has just the thing for you. The evil one is hard at work as we speak, taking 2GB thumb drives and placing them in the artifacts of genuine geek nostalgia. Really, who wouldn’t want to receive a hand-assembled computer peripheral in the shape of an Atari game cartridge or an NES controller? These things cost $29.99 (add another $5 for shipping and handling) and they’re available at this dude’s Etsy store. Check out the NES controller / drive yourself after the break

In the days of touchscreens and wireless data, our heroes of yesteryear find solace in the companionship of one another. From the creator, Byron Casebier: Here is my weak (and slightly unfinished) Atari iPod Dock. I thought sharing may create interest for someone that can do this better. As far as specs, I gutted a broken, iPod clock radio and put it all inside the Atari. Everything works except for the clock (it was the broken part)

Like many things in life, the whirrs and noises of old computers that were formerly annoying now inspire a nostalgic sense of retro glee — the bleating of a fax modem, the blatting of a large-format dot-matrix printer. It’s this sort of nostalgia that inspires some users to make them sing , like a YouTuber going by the handle of bd594 who orchestrated a collection of outdated gear to emit the soulful strings of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It starts with an HP ScanJet 3C playing the part of Freddie Mercury, then an Atari 800XL makes the organ sounds, TI-99/4a handles guitar duties, and a selection of other archaic goodies make visual and aural appearances. While the scanner did need to be recorded four separate times for all the “vocal” tracks, nothing was pitch-corrected, meaning your old scanner is officially more talented than three quarters of the Weekly Top 40.