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Glitch Art

Posted by Zonk on from the corrupt-doesn't-mean-ugly dept.

figa writes "Tony Scott at beflix has come up with a novel technique for creating art: load emulators with corrupt binaries and capture the output. The results are fantastic."

9 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. NO WAY!!! I'm gettin' all nostalgic/misty-eyed. by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I fondly remember back in the day when I first got my GAME GENIE at Christmas. I was trying all these codes on my new Super Mario 3. I figured out pretty quick that there was a pattern to the codes (warp to level X, where X changed the last digit in a code, with the letter sequence scrambled to make it less obvious).

    I wrote down the letter->hex digit conversion map, and I was hacking away.

    So I was playing with the warp-to-world codes and once you got beyond 8, you could get some CRAZY shit to come up.

    They were like (what I later found to be) palette-swapped tile-happy acid trips of maps. Things that resembled dungeons, impossibly linked paths between pipes and levels. And of course you couldn't move anywhere. Things were flashing, colored in garish reds, purples and other such nonsense. Holy crap, it was like looking into the mind of a clown on speed.

    I spent the rest of my vacation seeing how royally fucked up I could make my games by torturing them with Game Genie codes.

    This is just a more refined and controlled version of this (the Game Genie could only rewrite 5 bytes in the program ROM, this type of art is not limited to this).

    --
    THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
  2. mismunch! by lysander · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Also check out mismunch from xscreensaver. This is an intentionally buggy implementation of munch, a classic square-filling screensaver you've probably seen before.

    When I first saw it, I though it was printing out pictures of processor cores or something...

    --
    GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
  3. Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600 by wikthemighty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Remember the odd results you could get thrashing the reset game switch on the Atari 2600? Also by partially removing the cartridge while playing, or just when you turned the system on with the cart not contacting well (happens with most systems, especially when the contacts get worn/dirty) There's an interesting example of this on Tree Wave's Cabana EP one of the videos on the CD has music put to someone/something hitting the game select switch faster and faster with interesting animated results.

    More info at www.treewave.com

    --
    "There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
    1. Re:Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600 by Paul+Slocum · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't think it's possible to hit the Game Select button that fast. ;o) That video was produced by hacking Combat and adding a music driver that runs in the background, and then programming the music driver to transform and drop music data into the game's RAM space and the Atari's graphic registers in a somewhat controlled manner.

    2. Re:Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600 by embobo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I recall there was some way, using the techniques you describe, where one could get Space Invaders to give the player a double shot.

      Googling a bit I see the technique is simply to turn on the system while holding reset. We didn't figure that out.

  4. Something similar. by vitaflo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I did a similar thing many years ago, and created a sort of collage of glitch art with game ROMs. Instead of taking pictures of corrupt ROMs I took pictures of arcade games boot up sequences, usually during the ROM flush. A lot of old arcade games had this and it gave the weirdest looking garbage on screen before the game would load the title screen. I went through hundreds of games in MAME to find some good ones. Most of the backgrounds were black, so I made black transparent in all of them an then layered them on top of each other randomly. You can see the results here:

    http://ax.assembler.org

    Just click the page to get a new ROM boot collage. I also have a version that annimates randomly and alternating intervals which gives a nice psychodelic effect, but is a bit slow to do online.

  5. There's Glitch Music and now there's Glitch Art by thrash242 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I find stuff like this very cool. There's been a genre of music called "glitch" for well over a decade now that's made with the sounds of failing electronics and other things. It's more listenable than some of you may think. Most is arranged into interesting patterns, although some is very abstract. If you like IDM or similar stuff (Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc), you just might like it.

    Here is a link. It includes some bands and a description.

    Now it makes sense that there's glitch art. Cool stuff. I find stuff like this very interesting, as I find electronics and their output very interesting from an aesthetic perspective. I'm surprised more geeks don't like this sort of thing.

  6. I wouldn't exactly call this "novel" by Pluvius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    People have been doing stuff like this for quite some time. For just one recent example, Dave Kelly opened up his Flash Tub column at Something Awful with a few Flashes exploiting the weird sounds that an NES Game Genie makes. Not exactly the same thing, but very close.

    Rob

  7. atari 2600 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This reminds me of flipping the on off switch repeatedly on my atari 2600 back in the day...