001 – Circuit bent Nintendo Entertainment System, Critter and Guitari Video Synth, DIY Video Mixer

Back around 2009/2010, I started making chiptune music and regularly attending (and eventually setting up) chiptune shows. There was not a local scene for this type of music in Rochester, NY so I mostly engaged with this community via the internet using now defunct websites like 8bitcollective and watching videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

As I became more and more interested in chiptune music, I also became more and more interested in the visual art being projected behind the performers. Traveling to Blip Festival 2011 and seeing Party Time! Hexcellent! perform with Noisewaves was hugely influential. I would eventually discover Batsly Adams and marvel at the elegance of his creativity.

Eventually, I would find videos like those from the Playpower Foundation and teach myself how to write rudimentary assembly code, mining (copy/pasting) whatever wisdom I could from No Carrier’s website.

This all led to the creation of the setup you see below.

Custom Nintendo Rom

I started by creating my own Nintendo ROM. I mentioned No Carrier’s work before but this was a heavy influence for sure. I know I wrote the code myself but I was of course lifting inspiration from GalleryNES. I would create custom art for each show where I performed.

Circuit Bent Nintendo

This is really the heart of what I do. I cannot recall now where I first heard of this – not sure if I learned of Notendo before or after – but I discovered you could circuit bend a Nintendo by simply connecting pins of the graphics chip to each other. This would scramble whatever ROM you had loaded and often in unique and bizarre ways.

For this, I wired each pin of the graphics chip to a serial port mounted on the back of the Nintendo. I connect that to a breakout box where I can then use patch cables to create glitches. The green arcade buttons make it easy to perform the glitches along to live music.

Custom Nintendo Controller

This is not necessary to creating visual art but I thought it would be fun to share. At the time, I was looking for any possible way I could incorporate Nintendo hardware into my live performances. Modifying an NES controller into something I could step on like a guitar pedal while playing guitar with Revengineers seemed like a great idea. I used this mostly to trigger bits of Nintendo music in our songs where we wanted to slow down (like at the very end of this song) or where we wanted to jam a bit (like at 1:55 in this song).

“Dirt & Cheap Non-Sync Video Mixer” (Klomp, 2007)

The “dirty video mixer” was one of the first bits of electronics I ever tried to make on my own. It’s incredibly simple (though there are many people out there have developed incredible expanded versions of it). You basically wire two RCA jacks to a potentiometer and fade between these two video signals.

I remember being a kid in the 90’s, before cable packages really existed, and trying to watch a TV channel that your parents weren’t paying for. Sometimes it just showed white noise but other times you could sort of watch a highly scrambled version whatever that channel was showing. The vertical hold was wildly off, the colors were insane, the entire thing was glitching, but you could almost make out what was going on. See a modern example here.

The dirty video mixer is not the same thing as ‘scrambled TV’ but it produces a very similar look which is somehow nostalgic, analog, digital, and modern at the same time.

https://videocircuits.blogspot.com/2010/06/dirty-video-mixer.html

https://makezine.com/article/craft/make-interview-diy-video/

Critter & Guitari EYESY

The NES was always the centerpiece of my set up but what I would mix in with it has changed many times over the years. I’ve used a VCR to play bizarre old VHS tapes that I would find in thrift stores. I’ve used a second Nintendo playing classic games or ROMS like glitchNES. Most recently I have been using the Eyesy from Critter & Guitari. It can produce lots of interesting shapes and animated colors but I feel like I haven’t scratched the surface of what it is capable of yet.

The images attached below were created by taking photos and videos of the CRT monitor directly with a Canon 6D. They were only slightly touched up by adjusting basic controls like exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, etc.