Volatile Memory: How to Replace Your Game Boy Cartridge Batteries
This post is about maintenance, obsolescence, waste, and changing the batteries on your old Game Boy cartridges. Our goal to interrogate the black boxing of technology and to empower consumers to take apart their hardware and repair it themselves.
(Un)Controlled Vocabulary
This post was written by Alex Custodio and Michael Iantorno as part of their ongoing research work at the Residual Media Depot. In October 2020, in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, we decided to begin our long-anticipated cataloguing of the Residual Media Depot. The Depot’s status as an active research collection makes it challenging to document, since the collection seldom remains static for more than a few days at a time. However, with no possibility of taking our workshops to classrooms or even other universities, the lockdown has provided a morbidly ideal time to embark on our efforts to catalog the sheer amount of objects we have. Our initial foray into cataloguing has focused on home videogame consoles, primarily...
Main Research Questions
– What are the discourse networks that authorize console-modding practices? Who can participate in them and who is excluded? What counts as valuable knowledge and what is dismissed? – What operations and techniques circulate in these networks? To what extent are these techniques borrowed from other discourse networks? How are borrowed techniques adapted? Are any of the relevant techniques sui generis? Which techniques persist and which fade away? Have any circulated outward to other networks? – What kinds of official and unofficial documents do these networks produce? Where do they reside? How public are they? – What sorts of institutions recognize and enable these techniques and practices, and what sorts fail to comprehend their existence? – What sorts of subjects,...
Media Archaeology 2020
ENGL 603: Media Archaeology January-April 2020 1:15-4:30 Tuesdays 3 credits Darren Wershler (Concordia University) Concordia Department of English course page Course Description What is media archaeology? As Jussi Parikka describes, it is a subfield of media history that scrutinizes contemporary media culture through investigations of past media technologies and creative media practices. Media archaeology takes a special interest in recondite and forgotten apparatuses, practices and inventions. Media Archaeology also encourages opening up and tinkering with the “black boxes” of media technologies, in order to develop a relationship to them that is not based on being a “consumer” or “end user.” At an historical moment when our own media technologies become obsolete with increasing rapidity, the study of residual forms and...
Forensics: Genesis 2 with original Mega Amp
A brief but interesting teardown of a Sega Genesis model 2 containing one of Ace and Villahed's original Mega Amp boards
Weeknotes: 29 March 2019
This week, we opened up the Smash Box, an all-button fighting game controller made just for Smash games by the team at Hit Box.
Weeknotes: 22 March 2019
This was a very busy week at the Depot. We have four projects on the go: a database; the Wii-modding project; a new project dealing with Sega Genesis audio mods; and a Super Smash Brothers Melee project.
Arcade11 2019
Depot denizen Abbie Rappaport took her project on Super Smash Bros. Melee to the 2019 edition of Arcade11, the annual indie and experimental videogame showcase at Concordia. Here's her account of the experience.
The Game Boy’s Second Life: A Conversation with Retro Modding’s Olivier
The Residual Media Depot team recently had the pleasure of visiting Montreal-based Retro Modding. With Olivier, the founder and owner, we discussed entry into the modding scene, the political economy of hardware modding, and the nuts and bolts of video game modification and preservation.
Forensics: Genesis 1 component-mod
What makes this Sega Genesis “High Definition Graphics” model 1 unusual is that it has a full set of gold-plated AV jacks added to the rear, for component video (YpBPr) and stereo sound. In this post, we open it up to see what's inside.