Circuit Bend a Semi-Broken SNES Into a Video Synth

The art of circuit bending usually involves taking apart an electronic musical instrument, and literally poking around to see if you can produce new fun sounds with it. Could you do the same thing with a video source? Musical hacker “jwotto” shows just how this is possible in the video below, using the board from a somewhat broken Super Nintendo, along with an Arduino Pro Micro for MIDI control.

The build starts out with jwotto taking pictures of the bare SNES board in question, enabling him to mark interesting points that he finds. It’s then flipped over, using the cartridge itself as a stand so he can poke and prod different points to see glitching effects. After figuring out what’s going on, he connects it to a microcontroller board and transistor that makes it oscillate between 0 and 5V every 100ms, making a glitch blink on and off.

From there, he hooked up several “glitch points” up to a transistor PCB, allowing multiple effects to be controlled. The device is programmed to accept MIDI inputs to facilitate VJ performances, and then stuffed into the SNES case with the ports exposed on a 3D-printed faceplate. You can see a full performance after 6:00 in the video below, and more info on the arcade-style MIDI input he’s using in the beginning is found on jwotto’s website.