Category: Research
Mod Guide: New-Style SNES RGB Bypass Amplifier
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. New-Style SNES RGB Bypass Amplifier A common way to send video from a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) to a television is using composite video—the yellow cable featured alongside the red and white audio ones on the system’s Multi-Out. Composite, as the name implies, sends all the console’s video information through a single signal. Modders have long lamented the poor quality of composite video and have uncovered hidden affordances...
Mod Guide: Woozle Game Boy Advance Consolizer
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. Woozle Game Boy Advance Consolizer The Game Boy Advance Consolizer (GBAConsolizer) is something of an outlier among the mods we’ve completed at the Residual Media Depot. Typically, we have focused on altering the audiovisual output of the device with the specific goal of maintaining more-or-less seamless embodied engagement with the platform (ex. HDMI modding a Wii to use it on modern flat screen television). The full GBAConsolizer mod, however,...
Mod Guide: Solar-Powered Game Boy Pocket
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. Solar-Powered Game Boy Pocket This modding project is an adaptation of the solar-powered Game Boy Pocket mod that was developed by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. We first completed it as part of a Solar Media Collective workshop in 2022 and later repeated it as a class activity for Mess & Methods—a course we co-instructed as part of Concordia University’s summer institute. Simply put, this mod replaces a...
Mod Guide: Game Boy Pocket FunnyPlaying IPS 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 FunnyPlaying IPS LCD Installation This week, we returned to the Game Boy Pocket to install an alternative backlight solution, an IPS LCD from FunnyPlaying. These letters stand for “in-plane switching liquid crystal display,” which refers to a type of screen technology, and it differs from the screen we used in last week’s tutorial, which was a TFT LCD or thin-film transistor liquid crystal display. At the...
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,...
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.