Kieran Nolan » Circuit Bending

C64 basic and Intellivision glitching

Kieran — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:20:27 +0000

Here are some short exercises in game video glitching and 8bit graphics from my Vimeo account.

These visuals were recorded from an Intellivision TV Game system, I opened it up and connected up random points on the CMOS memory chip and PCB to generate these glitches.

Intellivision Circuit Bent Glitches from Kieran Nolan on Vimeo.

This is recorded from the C64 emulator ‘Virtual C64′, while testing out this code example for generating colour bars from the Commodore 64 user manual.

C64 – Colo(u)r CHR$ Codes from Kieran Nolan on Vimeo.

Here’s another piece of Commodore 64 code,
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
it generates a pattern based on pseudo-random numbers. Simple, but kind of hypnotic :)

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 from Kieran Nolan on Vimeo.

Hacking Toys, Bending Circuits

Kieran — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:39:08 +0000

Circuit bending is “the creative short-circuiting of devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.” (Wikipedia). Here’s a little video of some audio glitching that happened during the beginning stages of a project with DKIT’s Creative Multimedia 2nd years, where we modified children’s toys into tangible multimedia interfaces.

Circuit Bending (2008) from Kieran Nolan on Vimeo.

8bit Chiptune Workshop @ LABoral

Kieran — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:06:27 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I attended an 8bit chiptune workshop at LABoral in Gijón in the Asturias region Spain. The workshop was part of series of such running alongside LABoral’s Gameworld exhibition (a Second Life workshop had taken place earlier that week).

The teachers were Glomag and BubblyFish from New York and ‘Yes, Robot‘ and Rabato from Barcelona. These guys are big names in the chiptune scene and over the course of two days provided great hands on training making tracks on the oldschool Nintendo Gameboy using Little Sound DJ and Nanoloop.

LSDJ uses a text based tracker interface, you adjust the sound parameters by changing binary values. Nanoloop is more visual and you create sounds and sequences through by selecting icons and applying them to a 4 x 4 grid of squares. Both have their pros and cons but ultimately do the same job, directly controlling the Gameboy’s unique 4 channel sound sound chip.

The 8bit maestros also performed live on stage at LABoral backed up by Barcelona VJ duo Entter, who complemented all the music by syncing up pixel graphic visuals through their own custom built flash applications. A news reporter from Madrid described the show as “Beautiful” and I’ve got to agree. I’ve been into 8bit video game sounds and graphics since I was a child, but hearing this style of music blasting through a concert PA while watching huge pixel graphic projections was on another level of greatness altogether.

Both the workshop and live show were filmed for an upcoming documentary by Lionel Brouet, who made 8 Bit Generation, so that’s going to be very interesting to see. Anyway’s I’m back home now and starting to mess with the special cartridges, the Gameboy is plugged into my Micro Cube amp and I’m beginning to make some simple loops, will post whatever happens on my myspace page. Bleep!