Mylenium

It's almost like in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - 4070 is the answer to everything. Plugging such bricks at 90 degrees creates a smooth base onto which other stuff can be plugged, eleminitating the half stud offset. You may need some brackets in there onto which the 4070's themselves get plugged as illustrated by some of the examples as well, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Mylenium

„Prior Art“ is still a thing. As long as you can prove that something has been used before it was registered, it automatically invalidates any protection, be that as a patent or just a design. Therefore arguably LEGO registering pieces long before they are appear in sets could be construed as malicious intent to hinder competition, which as per the EUIPO's own rules should actually be a reason to deny the protection. They just completely ignore that, which shows ho dysfunctional the whole system is and how incompetent they are. That also applies to your Apollo-Stud. Ultimately it's an inescapable technical solution, not a design thing. I'm too lazy to dig into this, but I suspect that is the point they failed to get across successfully by not illustrating some strong use cases... Mylenium

Both? The simple truth is that design registrations are "blind" and highly automated. Nobody really looks at them unless someone complains. So unless LEGO's competitors get their act together and really pick up the baton to combat this, not much will happen. That's ultimately what riles me up all the time. They complain all the time that LEGO is making their life hard, but nobody seems to be willing to put their money where their mouth is and actually follow through with formal proceedings... Mylenium

That would open up that whole can of worms about all the legalese. True, a 1 x 9 plate would be obvious, but you'd still have to potentially combat a design registration by LEGO to get the restrictions lifted. Unfortunately the whole system is backwards and LEGO are masterfully exploiting this to a T. Mylenium

That's one side of the argument and the other simply is that with their recent move to more collectible display models they have less and less excuses to leave models with obvious gaps. In the past the likely wouldn't have bothered with producing a 2 x 2 plate with a rounded corner since the existing one with the cropped corner structurally works well enough and the unfilled areas are not that big, but of course that reasoning changes when you sell models worth hundreds of Euro. Let's also not forget that in that area they are competing even more with the likes of COBI and others who had some of those pieces for years. There's also an apparent third reason: New designs can be registered and protected. So from a simple viewpoint of spoiling it for the competition it can make sense to have a new element and/ or replace an older one with a new design. Mylenium

Yes, I'm well aware of that. The alignment of the screen should be a lot, better, though. I've worked with enough clients from the print industry (those that build the actual machines as well as print shops) and most of them would find this unacceptable when you can literally calibrate offset and flexo machines to a thousandth millimeter and the same goes for the ones gluing on the prism foil and doing the (die) cutting. UV printing/ pad printing is a different beast, but even here I would argue that it should be better even without pre-assembling groups of elements. It's not witchcraft to build stoppers and alignment templates and hold elements in place with vacuum even if you have to accept some tolerances with a material like ABS. In any case, the point here is at the very least that the deviations should not be this massive and QA should have caught and remedied them before anything left the factory. Mylenium

Yeah, like the man said... Creating MOCs is in large parts just experience and knowing what each piece is good for so you can use that knowledge to solve your engineering and design challenges. Some stuff can be fixed quickly, but if you want to re-design the whole model then that's another level. Hard to tell what you are actually want to do based on your generic post. Mylenium

The cloning happens when the prism foil is slightly misaligned with the print underneath, so yes, request a replacement if it's important to you. Same for the misaligned "Sound" print. Commonality is not an excuse to ignore genuine lapses in quality. Mylenium

I've always been a computer guy and my commutes were mostly trouble free. I also always worked a lot from home already when this wasn't even as common as it is today, ferrying my data along on mobile drives instead of direct Internet access. The most exciting thing was probably me looking sexy in my cycling gear during summer when I took those 40 km to and from work by bike. *lol* Otherwise back then those super expensive SGI graphics workstations would have gotten people drooling, but by today's standards they'd look just like generic computers inspired by Apple design as well. These days my life is dictated by my medical issues and probably even more boring. Perhaps an expressionistic sculpture of what my illness does to me would be a thing, but otherwise my life is really kind of average and wouldn't make for a good LEGO scene. Mylenium

That is certainly a valid point, but that's just the way it is, especially nowadays where LEGO clearly are more into creating collectible models than allowing users to build their own creations. They'd rather recolor some weird part that you don't even know existed for one of their 300 Euro models than do the same for a 30 Euro Creator 3in1 package. Mylenium

A few random thoughts: Depends on what you consider too specialized, I guess? This is one of those weird questions that always comes up, yet nobody seems to be able to exactly explain what they mean and why certain elements seem to downright offend them. Never! :-) The merits of certain colors can certainly be debated, but I'm in the camp that can never have enough different colors at hand. I'll easily admit that this is due to my background in graphics design/ artsy stuff and wanting things to look nice and so it's also part of the truth that I'd probably not be very interested in LEGO if we were stuck with only some basic colors. It kind of goes together. I used to be since I started out with Technic, but these days one can confidently say that LEGO have lost the plot and were surpassed by competitors. Technic has become a very bad version of its former glory with tons of issues. Mylenium

I'm thinking more in terms of K'nex or Fischer Technik or other non-brick construction sets. Digging up hard evidence would probably be a major undertaking, but I definitely remember this stuff being regularly cheaper than LEGO. Of course it's totally subjective. Finding info on other brick systems would be even harder, since they basically didn't exist here in Europe. Most companies only started entering the market when the patents expired in 2011 and it was clear that LEGO also couldn't register a generalized trademark for their brick system, only specific designs. That being said, I definitely think COBI was cheaper than LEGO ten years ago based on a few planes I built back then. Today they are pretty much on a similar level with pricing. Mylenium

I guess it depends?! In absolute terms LEGO has always been more expensive than comparable other toys. However, personally I think people were more willing to overlook it because the toy market overall was different. I've been doing LEGO only for the last nine years, but I have some memories of plastic scale modeling and railroad modeling when I was into that. Similar discussions happened there like e.g. Hasegawa or Tamiya kits being "premium" and getting more expensive by the year. This was then further escalated when new brands like Eduard cropped up and offered the same quality or better for a much lower price or long-standing brands like Revell or Airfix started producing higher quality sets from new molds also at reasonable prices. And bluntly put that's the same problem with LEGO. It isn't necessarily overly expensive in absolute terms, but these days there's a lot of competitors that show it can be done better and more cost-efficient. That's why it feels that some LEGO sets are just out of control in terms of price. And yes, we can have endless debates about actual manufacturing cost, normalized average prices, inflation and a million other factors. All that said personally I feel that the return value for my money has gotten worse with LEGO over those last nine years. Perhaps I'm just old and jaded, but it's just not as exciting as it used to be and I feel that there's a flood of mediocre stuff that devalues the brand and the user experience... Mylenium

You would have to over-bend it on a rounded cushion or something and then gently warm it up with a blow dryer. That's how in the olden times they flattened photos on paper, BTW. Just heating it will not get rid of the warping due to how the tension is distributed between the flat areas and the studs vs. the polymer chains trying to relax even more when they feel that cozy warmth. Mylenium

Agree with the others. You'd most likely need some sort of custom encapsulated modules replacing whatever buttons are there. The rest sounds a lot simpler. I'm pretty sure on those Asian electronics market web sites you could already find a complete kit from which to build a 3D printed Game Boy emulator that just would need to be fitted into the LEGO stuff. I still have the old GB cartridges, but I haven't bothered to dig them out just for the chance I could build one using such a kit. Running an emulator on another device is just more convenient. Fun as your project sounds you probably will have a tough time convincing people to buy it, at least if my own laziness is any indication. ;-) Mylenium