I’ve circuit bend a somewhat broken Super Nintendo in to a video synthesizer lolol.
When is was poking around some wire on the circuitboard of the Nintendo i did found some cool spot that I could connect together. when i connected those spots i got these great visuals glitches.
I used some 122 transistors i had laying around (i know overkill…haha) to connect those spots so I can control the circuit bends with a arduino. Then i created a midi input for the arduino so i can control those glitches during my music…
Should i circuit bend more of those old game consoles? this was such a fun project.
Sir, this is brilliant and I’m going to go right on over to your Youtube channel and subscribe - and even click on the bell - purely on the basis of this video.
Love the sexy pink panel as well any reason for not keeping one of the controller ports though, to get past start screens?
I know I’m just shouting out every retro console here but also thinking that if the mods mean you can’t get past the main menus, some megadrive/genesis games had awesome menu screen art - Golden Axe, Shinobi and Streets of Rage II spring to mind
I don’t think it would work, not the way that this does. The way graphics work on the NES, SNES and Gameboy (and possibly the GBA, but I’ve never poked around in one of them) is what makes this hack work (and why Mario was missing in the first place). It’s a combination of rigidly defined data structures for tiles and sprites baked into the hardware - the graphics chip knows what it has to do and how to do it, and just gets on with displaying the data it is presented with. If you start messing about with that data, you start getting the glitches - it’s a lot like circuitbending a Casio SK-1 by shorting the lines on the ROMs; the keyboard knows how to play data but you’re getting in there and tying its shoelaces together
3D based consoles have far less standardisation at an electronic level because the data structures being dealt with can’t be worked in the same way. That why these videos could only be created by fiddling about with the game engine’s parameters
Ah! Yeah fair enough - interesting to know! I played a lot of these machines growing up but know very little about how they operate aha. Thought the 3D stuff would be harder to do - maybe it would be interesting to see some of these style hacks with some of the pseudo-3D games that came out on the NES/SNES. There’s something about the idea of dimension-bending glitches which appeals to me - 2d glitches in a 3d world ooooOOooo
Also, that video if horrifying - as if Resident Evil wasn’t spooky enough! Learning to mod games has been on my to-do list since i was about 15 but I never got any further than making skins for the odd game here and there
There are many free ways to program your own cartridges. I’ve only done it for gameboy but I’d imagine its the same deal. That way you could create and possibly MIDI control your own visuals to glitch.
I did a fair bit of game coding waaaaaaaay back in the day. 3D was too different for me to enjoy (and now I just do boring business things for money). My old manager ended up working on the Lego Star Wars games, then Little Big Planet 2 for the PS Vita. He’s clever which is why he was my manager
BTW does anybody know why america got the square Super Nintendo design. and Europe did get the super famicon design. while Europe and America had the same first generation VCR loader type design. I know the story of the first generation of the Nintendo but why oh why did Europe get a different design then America with the second generation Nintendo consoles?
any reason for not keeping one of the controller ports though, to get past start screens?
