In Hardware

hello, i'm a newbie here, but i was hoping you might be able to help me with a project i'm working on.

i've searched the forums but couldnt find anything relating to what i'm after, so thought i'd ask.

i'm working on a project, which is a circuit bent nes(whic is finished, infact this is my 5th deck i've built for someone) and need to find a way to control two nes decks with one controller for an interactive art installation for someone. i've tried a number ofg things, but so far they've all failed.

i want to play the same game, mario for example, on both nes decks, one of which is circuit bent and Hooked up to a projector, the other being Hooked up to a tv, so you can play it as normal, and project the bent visuals from the ohter deck for the crowd to see.... (crazy i know)

does any one have any tips? i'm about to connect one controller with two cables, and disconnect the ground and 5volt supply from one consol, but i thought i'd see if anyone else has managed this and has got anything to say on the mater, apart from the fact its maddness.


cheers in advance,


bod.

I'm a bit confused about this. You need to control two NES decks at the same time, so you can put one of the NESs on a projection screen? If that's the case, couldn't you figure out a way to just use a single NES and utilize both the RF and also the composite outputs (considering you're using a toaster, that is)? Unless this is all for the sake of doing it with two NESs

I tested it and it does work with both TVs, so I imagine you could use the composite to go to something Hooked up to the projector... or something.

maybe didnt explain that very well... sorry.

the first deck will be circuit bent, and when activating the bends/switches/patch bay on this deck, it renders the game unplayable, due to the fact the glitches on the screen are so intense its a jumbled mess of 8bit maddness with mario running arround.... because of this you can't play the game, and in the past i have used the play back scripts on a pc to play a movie of the game by sending prerecorded control pad signals to the nes decks via a link cable from the pc to the game pad port, while palying arround with the bends.

with the project i'm doing, the guy wants people to be able to play the game normally, yet in order to do this, i need to have two decks, one bent, one not, but i need to have the same game being bent at the same time to a different out put. so in effect, one player playing two consoles simutaniously.

so i need to have one normal nes Hooked up to a tv to be played as normal, and the same control movements from that being duplicated on the bent nes deck, running the same game.... is that better? sorry for the confusion.

Your theory about connecting one controller to two consoles will work. You'll just need to leave out the POWer pin from one of them, as that would run 10v into the controller, and likely fry the IC.

So I suggest just building an adapter, and neglecting to connect the POWer pin in one of them, since you wouldn't want to permanently disable that pin in the actual console.

I'm interested to know just what this "circuit bend" involves though, I still don't know exactly what you mean...

hi luke, cheers for the adVice, thats what i thought as well about leaving the 5v pin out, i'll give it a go this after noon.


circuit bending is basically taking old electronics and short circuiting them to create something different. normally its done with old drum machines and speak and spells, but i found a way of shorting the game chips in the cartridges to use for visuals for night club events and art instalations.

here's a few screen shots from some one else, i dont have a capture card for my computer yet.







these images dont really do it justice though....

also this guys site provides an insite to the kinda thing i can create.




cheers for the help guys, i'll let you know how i get on.


bod.

If it does that to the graphics, What does it sound like?

amazingly no different!!! the sound chip is inside the nes from what i can tell, and the cartidge sends the signal to it, but thats in the chip i dont touch as it starts crashing the game.

just tested my adapter thingy... works a treat! cheers luke.

Congrats bod! If you have any other projects, make sure and let us know. You're the first to have something like that.

ironic eh? cheers roth!

i've uploaded a couple of pictures of what the box/spliter looks like. they are a bit big to put on here so you'll have to follow the links.





its just a small project box from Maplin, with a hole in one end with a grommet to make it look nice. gotta look professional after all! and two holes with a grommet each on the other end. on the inside i used a junction box to split each wire into and then connected two sockets(one from the game pad, and one that was butchered from an old controller).

this way i can disconect the 5v wire from one of the sockets so that the game pad doesnt receive 10volts, thus frying the chip in the controller.


as for other projects, i've been asked to come up with the mother of all zapper guns for the same guy to use with Duckhunt. so i'll be retro fitting some sort of kids bazooka toy with the inards of the zapper. i'll let you know how i get on.


cheers guys!


bod.

:lol: ironic eh? cheers roth!

i've uploaded a couple of pictures of what the box/spliter looks like. they are a bit big to put on here so you'll have to follow the links.





its just a small project box from Maplin, with a hole in one end with a grommet to make it look nice. gotta look professional after all! and two holes with a grommet each on the other end. on the inside i used a junction box to split each wire into and then connected two sockets(one from the game pad, and one that was butchered from an old controller).

this way i can disconect the 5v wire from one of the sockets so that the game pad doesnt receive 10volts, thus frying the chip in the controller.


as for other projects, i've been asked to come up with the mother of all zapper guns for the same guy to use with Duckhunt. so i'll be retro fitting some sort of kids bazooka toy with the inards of the zapper. i'll let you know how i get on.


cheers guys!


bod.
Actually, there might be a certain style factor in using a Super Nintendo Super Scope

Hi, bod..
I was wondering, is this a College level project or for something else.

no, this all started with muy lust for something a bit differnet.... and geekyness as well i suppose! this project is for a club event, but in a gallery, so its an installation of sorts.

crazy man

Actually, I had a thought. What would happen if you replaced the CHR chip from, say, Mario with one from, for example Duckhunt? Of course, the replacement CHR would have to be about the same size, but you'd get one whacked out display.

It might also be interesting if you could figure out a way to "overlay" the circuit bent graphics on top of the "pure" output, and possibly include further , different, Circuit Bent NES overlays.

Chances are that it would either refuse to boot, or lock up as soon as it tried to access the graphics.

it could be an interesting thing to try though, just as a "what if" experiment.

Chances are that it would either refuse to boot, or lock up as soon as it tried to access the graphics.

it could be an interesting thing to try though, just as a "what if" experiment.
Easiest way to try it out would be to use an emulator as "proof of concept". Split a NES file into it's component chip images, then recombine it with part of another one, or even a raw binary image of the right size pulled from another file (not nessicarily a NES image).

In theory it should work: it's not that dissimilar to what graphic hacks do.

Well, it is in that graphics hacks edit existing graphics, which are loaded from a specific place in the CHR NES ROM. Replacing the chip entirely could have you loading PCM samples as sprite data, and that wouldn't go well.

if youre running two nes's with the same game, youll have to make sure theyre exactly the same revision of nes and of the game, otherwise you could get a delay on one of them, meaning they wouldnt be perfectly synced.
also, i dont think connecting both +v lines would hurt it, putting POWer sources in parallel doesnt increase the voltage, but still.. if it works now, dont change it:P

i'm actually really suprised the controller works on both systems, doing that means it's getting two clock signals, which should mess things around quite alot, unless one nes is syncing to the other one somehow..

Well, it is in that graphics hacks edit existing graphics, which are loaded from a specific place in the CHR NES ROM. Replacing the chip entirely could have you loading PCM samples as sprite data, and that wouldn't go well.
When you get down it it, they're both binary data. The NES wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Ever loaded a WAV file as a raw image in a paint package? You often just get a nice staticky effect. I figure you'd probably get the same result here, only in a tile based fashion, and importantly, the game would theoretically still be completely playable, only with heavily glitched graphics. The results of replacing one games tiles with anothers though should be... interesting, to say the least

Of course, you might well be right that it would just lock up. I really don't know all that much about the NES hardware at the moment.

Hmm, it seems you're right about it locking up, though I've no idea why. I think I got as close to ripping chips out of boards and swapping them around as I'm likely to get for the time being.

I used NAPIT (From Zophars Domain) to rip a Duckhunt NES ROM and a Mario NES ROM to pieces, then inserted the Duckhunt graphics place of the mario graphics and got myself a non-working NES ROM. Now, it's possible I just screwed something up during my little experiment, but it was a straight transplant of two identically sized bitmap files, but I can't run the resultant NES ROM in JNes or Virtuanes. All I can figure is there's either some kind of checksum someplace, or some of those "tiles" I replaced are actually critical lines of machine code.

This probably goes to prove something, but I'm not sure what, aside from the fact that I'm technically inept, and the fact that the fact that a real NES works at all after being "circuit bent" is nothing short of a bona-fide miracle

I think the problem with NAPIT is that it converts "an entire NES ROM to a bitmap" (Zophar description). Meaning, that the actual CPU instructions are also part of the bitmap. So you're replacing machine code as well as sprites (assuming that you didn't go through and individually pick out what was true sprite and what wasn't). Also, perhaps some of the machine code got "lost in translation" so to speak, I don't know.

However, I don't see why swapping the ROM contents wouldn't result in just a copy of the original ROM (ie loading up "SMB.nes" would actually play Duckhunt).

It might be possible to swap graphics though on an NES cart, if the graphics are stored in a separate chip from everything else.

In theory they are, but there could be a lot more than just sprites on that chip. I stand by my guess that it just wouldn't work.

what have i started here?! some intertesting points on here, think i might try swapping the chips to see what happens, since i have spare cartridges and i am always up for an experiment... one question though, which one is the CHR chip? is that the chip on the left or the right if the 72 pins are facing away from you?


cheers,


bod.

If you open up your cart, the chips should be labeled right on them. I've noticed it usually has the initials (or close to the initials) of the name of the game, and says CHR or PRG on whichever chip respectively. I think usually the CHR is closest to the CIC chip. However, don't quote me on the latter one, as I haven't popped open all my carts yet I'm still learning all of this, but I'm pretty sure the CIC chip is the 16-pin chip that's on the far right as the pins are facing away from you.

yep, the CIC is on the right hand side, and has 16 pins, the same as the one in the console.
in my UK carts, only one of the chips is labled with PRG, so i'm guessing the other is the CHR. I'll let you know how i get on!

If you want to create a real screwed up picture, (which you do), my idea would be to buy some Y splitters, like this: and input 2, 3, or even 4 video outputs onto the TV. The TV tries to project all the inputs at once and makes a real messed up picture with lots of colors and randomization. Best of all there only like $4 each.

yep, tried that one before! looks great, well, to me anyway.

heres some footage i took with my digital camera, the quality is not the best and you can see the roll from the tv, but i cant afford a video capture card just now.

Wheres the pics?

I'm a HUGE advocate for circuit bending. Ever heard the group Voice Crack? They've dedicated the last couple of decades to making electronic equipment do what it was never meant to do. Great sounds.

More recently(and perhaps at a more popular level) you have the new Fantomas album 'Suspended Animation' that extensively utilises cercuit bending techniques.

I've seen some pretty cool curcuit bent nentendo games in my time. There's an art ensemble who dedicate a alot of their time to contorting nintendo games into mangled 8-bit cyber-junk.

It's all so post-modern isn't it?

so, would you be able to play Contra 2 players by yourself with that controller? that'd be bad ass if you could. only thing is both players would be being controlled by the same controller and would move exactly the same. the bridge in level 1 could mess one of the players up. with the 30 lives code you could die a few times there and it wouldn't matter . it'd be awesome to play Contra like that!

EDIT: wow that picture is big, i'll put the link up instead of the pic