Custom Super Mario World SNES cartridges for my groomsmen!

My fiancee had a great idea to make a box with some goodies to officially ask her bridesmaids to be in her wedding party. I wanted to do something as well, but put my own twist on it. And so, I made these custom SNES cartridges to officially ask my groomsmen to be in my wedding party!

I was able to find some cheap SNES cartridges at a local retro games store. The owner had no problem giving me a bunch of old sports games as those things never sell anyway.

I already had some cheap Nintendo screwdrivers to take out the old components so I could put a simple USB hard drive into each of the cartridges.

The USB just barely pokes out of the bottom so I can allow the eventual owners to either display the cartridge standing up or on an angle.

I used a combination of a hairdryer and isopropyl alcohol to clean the old stickers off these cartridges. This was one of the most time-consuming parts of the project so if anyone has any other tips on removing SNES cartridge stickers, I'm happy to hear suggestions for future projects!

I have a very talented friend who was able to Photoshop a Mario-style wedding picture that fit the Super Nintendo cartridge. The text came from the generator found here: https://fontmeme.com/super-mario-font/

Then we just applied the image to a Super Nintendo cartridge sticker template and changed some markers. The cartridge shows the date of our wedding as well as where we met. Anything blocked out has names that I didn't want to share.

I found a very talented SNES sticker designer and printer on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/CuffsPlus) and he was excited to help with this project. Here is a picture of the stickers first printed and tested with a SNES cartridge for reference.

Only a week or so later and I received my labels with some free back stickers as well to fully get that new cartridge feel.

I also learned how to do some simple sprite and textbox editing for Super Mario World using Lunar Magic: https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lm/

This tool is very useful for Super Mario World editing and there's a ton of helpful videos on how to use Lunar Magic on YouTube. I know the title screen doesn't look very impressive, but it was extremely hard to make some of those letters using the pieces given!

So when a groomsmen plugs in the cartridge to their PC/device, they just open the .exe file and the game will start running.

This is just some simple text editing for the game introduction.

And a custom world 1. I just changed the map for world 1 so that there's only one level. I didn't want to make it difficult and actually put in levels for some of the non-gaming groomsmen.

And when you land on the level, the name of the groomsmen the cartridge is for shows up here.

And then the official message asking them to be a part of my wedding party!

And finally the completed cartridge with sticker and all! Now for some wrapping.

I added twine and a name tag for each cartridge so I won't need to plug them in to figure out which belongs to which groomsmen. The twine also secures a bag on the back with a USB female to male cable so there shouldn't be any issues with fitting the USB port into any PC/device.

And there you have it! A neat little project that didn't break the bank but also seemed pretty unique and fits my style. Hope you all enjoyed it!

And of course, Waffles is available for any dog tax requests!