Video: Speak & Spell boombox mod

This whole thing started weeks ago when fellow Craver Tim Moynihan posted a story on a vintage NES game controller and cartridge that had been modded into an MP3 player and portable speaker. Not to be outdone, I realized that my homebrew MP3 player, the Little Professor, needed an equally nostalgic portable speaker system. A quick look through my closet produced the most worthy candidate imaginable--a malfunctioning vintage Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, manufactured the same year as the Little Professor--the year of my birth, 1978. Excellent.

If E.T. can use one to phone home, surely we can hack it to work with our iPod.
Click the photo to launch the Crave slide show.

(Credit: Donald Bell / CNET Networks)

Transforming the Speak & Spell into a portable speaker system wasn't nearly as elegant as I had hoped, but by performing a quick and dirty transplant of the broken Speak & Spell guts with an eviscerated iMainGo iPod speaker system, I was able to get a kick-ass system in just a few hours.

Here's a slide show of the Speak & Spell surgery.