Nintendo NES Retro Hardware Revived to Monitor Global Flights in Real Time

If you've got an old Nintendo Entertainment System collecting dust somewhere, you might want to plug it back in. Someone found a surprisingly cool new use for Nintendo's 1985 console: tracking real planes.

The project is called NES Radar, and it comes from developer Levi Maaia. It does exactly what the name suggests. You can use an original NES to see aircraft moving around an airport in real time.

You start by loading a custom cartridge into the console. Then, using the NES controller, you enter the four-letter code of an airport. Hit Start, and the screen suddenly turns into a tiny flight radar.

The dots on the screen aren't part of a game, either. They represent actual planes currently flying near the selected airport.

Try a smaller airport and you might only see a few aircraft. Pick somewhere like LAX, though, and things get busy pretty quickly.

Of course, there is one obvious problem here. The NES was released more than 40 years ago and has absolutely no way to connect to the internet.

That's where a modern computer comes in.

A separate program running on the computer grabs live flight data from a public tracking service. It filters the information based on the airport you selected and sends the relevant data to the NES through one of its controller ports.

The console itself isn't downloading anything. It basically acts as a very old-school display, while the computer handles everything happening in the background.

Well, nobody needs an NES to track flights. You can obviously open a website or app and get far more information in seconds. NES Radar isn't trying to replace that.

It's just a weird and clever experiment that gives a nearly four-decade-old game console something completely new to do.

The NES was designed for games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Seeing one display live aircraft data in 2026 is definitely not something Nintendo had in mind when the console launched.

Still, it works. And its cool.