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Circuit Bent SNES

One of my artistic passions is investigating hardware glitches within interactive gaming systems. I have investigated hardware hacking with a number of popular gaming consoles including the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, PS1, and N64. Out of all these consoles, I have enjoyed working with the Super Nintendo more than any other options due to the visual quality of the resulting bends and the ease of working with the console.

This page focuses on providing a brief overview of my work with circuit bending SNES gaming consoles. For reference, click on the following links for pages related to my installations leveraging circuit bent video game consoles including:

• SNES - Symbiotic SNES
• NES - Retrono Interace
• NES - CRT Installation

SNES Hardware Hacking Process

As demonstrated in the video above, the process for hacking a new SNES video game console I developed for my work is quick and straightfoward. While not reccomended to be adopted for hardware hacking other devices, the entire process relies on shorting cartridge pins to the sysem's logic ground or high voltage level to manipulate the process of retreiving sprites from the cartridge storage.

This approach results in game functioning as normal, concerning user control inputs and operating logic, but where the visual elements of the games are replaced with alternate sprites.

Related Works and Further Reading

This work relies heavily on circuit bending and hardware hacking techniques. Some of my writing on these topics can be found HERE.