Sunday, April 17, 2011

NES Video Mod

















After a few weekends of soldering, I finished together with a friend of mine the first two circuit-bended NES. The mod is based on Phillip Stearns great "NES Circuit Bent Audio Visualizer"(UPDATE: His new artist-page is here , but unfortunately his NES-mod project is actually not on the page, so I decided to upload all information and the schematics  https://www.dropbox.com/s/63uutrpl738a4xn/NES_mod_by_Phillip_Stearns.zip?dl=0). A 4-band EQ generates many different interconnections on the PCB of the NES which leads to a wonderful 8-bit flickering video-output.

I recorded the NES video-output with a new irq7 song with a very cheap video-to-USB converter. To do this in a clean way, I was forced to take the ground from the PCB instead of the NES video-out. Otherwise the video-quality was too bad.



The first step to the mod was the production of the PCB, which was a little disaster, but finally I fixed it. Making and bring the PCB's into service was the most time-consuming work.














Then I started to mound the PCB into the NES with a hot-melt gun, add all bending-points according to Phillips instruction and solder all the rotary-switches to them.