Category: Research
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.
Emulation at the Residual Media Depot
An emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system to behave like another. At the Depot, we're interested in emulation for a variety of reasons.
The Platformization of Nostalgia
This is how business is done in the age of the Stack. On a global scale, Nintendo is concentrating decades of public interactions with its games and game systems into the narrowest possible channel, in order to shut down cultural practices that they don't like, and to extract maximum profit.
Reflection: Playful Encounters in the Depot
Before I came to media studies or media archaeology, I trained as a theater artist. The word "train" weighs heavily in that sentence. Over our week-long course, we talked a fair amount about "training": how disciplination emerges from the various ways that scholars are trained into practices, and how we code those various ways with residues of geography, culture, language, and tactics.
Reflections on the experience of building an arcade table
During my week at the Residual Media Depot, I participated in a group of two teams, with 2-3 members each, and transformed an IKEA coffee table into an arcade table using after-market arcade parts and a raspberry pi emulator. In this post, I discuss some of the ideas that emerged from the experience.