Mod Guide: Game Boy Pocket Backlit LCD
This summer, as part of our activities with the Residual Media Depot, Alex Custodio and I are modding several videogame consoles while closely documenting our work. The goal of this project is to create a series of succinct, approachable modding guides that detail the tools and techniques needed for hardware modding. Game Boy Pocket Backlit LCD Installation Our first modding project involved implementing a MGB TFT Backlit Kit to a Game Boy Color (MGB). While this mod would usually be considered an enhancement project, our MGB had a broken screen, so one of the main goals was simply to get it working again (albeit with a better screen). We used a kit sourced from Retro Modding, which included the backlit...
Recap: A Learning Computer at the Bad Game Arcade
Early Home Computing Technologies and/as Teaching Tools
Recap: Game Boy Camera Photobooth at the NOSTALGIA/LOSTAGAIN Symposium
In 1998, Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera: a cartridge-based digital camera that allows players to take digital pictures, edit their saved files, and even print them using the Game Boy Printer accessory. While relatively lo-fi by today’s standards—with a 128×112 pixel screen beholden to the 4-colour palette of the Game Boy handheld—it was one of the earliest consumer digital cameras. Magazine advertisements for the Game Boy Camera In 2023, we brought the Residual Media Depot’s Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer to the NOSTALGIA/LOSTAGAIN Symposium at Concordia University. Our hope was to allow audiences to playfully interact with the now venerable camera while reflecting upon its limiting, yet enduring, aesthetic. During the workshop slot, we encouraged visitors to...
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.
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.