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

/ April 3, 2019

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.

/ April 1, 2019

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.

/ March 23, 2019

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.

/ March 18, 2019

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.

/ February 27, 2019

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.

/ February 7, 2019

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.

/ September 2, 2018

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.

/ August 31, 2018

Forensics: Super Famicom component-mod

A forensic examination of the Depot's Nintendo Super Famicom, which has been modified with the addition of ports for composite video, S-video and component video, while leaving the functionality of Nintendo’s “multi out” connector intact.

/ February 14, 2018

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.

/ June 19, 2017