An actual circuit bent Gameboy (?) and some Lego
June 28th, 2007I’m actively checking my search engine referrers, so I know what people were looking for when they got here. I’ll do also do a more complete post about this, Syd Lexia style.
One of the more popular keywords for people finding their way here, are Gameboy circuit bending. (And related terms) This is what I believe to be the first actual circuit bent Gameboy I’ve come across. (Found by accident on youtube) I’m not totally sure if the guts are actually from a Gameboy though.
This might also be of interest: A bent Casio SK-8 with a breakout box made of a GB case. Done by the pro-bender Kaseo.
And also another little thing I found by accident: A Gameboy built in Lego. (Although it looks like a prop, it looks damn nice)
Found at Brickshelf.
Glitched IBM Thinkpad 600E
April 25th, 2007I have a Thinkpad 600E that I inherited from my boss when I worked as a telephone salesperson. (Not my kind of job, btw) I’ve spent some time and money on upgrading and refurbishing it. What was once a 400 MHz PII with 64 MB RAM and a 6 Gb HD is now a 702 MHz PIII with 288 MB RAM and a 80 Gb HD. (Actually overclocked twice, which I did by soldering wires onto SMD components. Tricky work.)
To some people’s standards it may be slow, but it works fine for me.
But something that annoys me is that every 2-3 months or so, the graphics chip goes crazy and totally glitches out. Even after rebooting, the image still gets glitched. The only thing that seems to work is to change the graphics driver, and then change it back.
So getting rid of the glitch mode is easy. However, enterring it is not. I have yet to find out a way to summon the glitch mode. I find some of the things it does to my graphics pretty nice, and I’d like to be able to control it and use it as an image processing effect. (You can take screenshots of the glitches, which indicates that the glitched data is somehow written back to the video memory.)
Glitches happen spontaneously, as well as when moving windows, or even just the mouse pointer. (Which makes it possible to glitchify areas of the screen)
One of the reasons I’m bringing this up now, is because of a recent discussion on the benders yahoo group. (A mailing list for circuit benders) Jeremy of cutthroatfreaksshow had bought an LG Fusic camphone, which had appearantly bent itself. All images were pink-and-white instead of colored. Here are some of them. (Interestingly enough, pink seems to be a key color for my 600E as well)
An even more interesting glitched camera is owned Farrell Eaves. (Read article on LJWorld)
Back to my computer. When in glitch mode, the computer reacts differently depending on the color depth in use. If using a depth of 16 bpp, the glitches are more aggressive, so to speak, and there’s a lot of color burn kind-of effects, and text printed on the screen is heavily affected. When in 24 bpp mode, the glitches are often more subtle. This mode can produce some more subtle dirty effects. These effects remind a little of those used by NiN in their viral marketing campaign, and I find them visually appealing. (One of NiN’s sites)
’nuff said, here are the pictures:
Oh yeah, Limewire? No thank you, it’s probably one of the worst p2p clients I’ve used. Eats memory and CPU, and additionally has crap results. It’s just there because I was convinced by a friend to try it.
