MIDI-Controlled Sega Genesis Video-Glitch – Part 3

Back to the Sega Genesis Mods! If you’re catching up, check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Where we left off, I had found my glitch points, and I was going to get digging in to some kind of button control before moving on to MIDI control.

Wires soldered to the underside of the VRAM
Wires soldered to the underside of the VRAM

Here are the pins of the VRAM with some wires from some selected spots. Purists might fault me for not running off of all of the 44 available points (48 minus the two VCCs and two grounds), but I didn’t have that many buttons anyway.

Not a huge fan of electrical tape, but what can you do?
Not a huge fan of electrical tape, but what can you do?
Wires run to a set of female headers
Wires run to a set of female headers

After taping things down, I ran the wires to a set of headers. The reason for using headers is to keep the ability to remove the top of the Genesis if I want to get back inside for any reason.

Female headers plug into phone keypad
Female headers plug into phone keypad

I had a phone keyboard kicking around, and I figured this would be a simple alternative to setting up a matrix of buttons. How this works, then, is any one button connects two points (which two points hardly matters), and if one holds down multiple buttons at the same time, several data points start cross-talking with different visual results

Are you ready for this?

Behold!
Behold!
The Keypad-Controlled Glitch Genesis!
The Keypad-Controlled Glitch Genesis!

Here’s a video of it in action:

Now, of course, while I’m stoked about my new toy, this instrument is not yet what I set out to do (and what the title of these posts proclaims).

MIDI-Control, though is just a quick hop away. Next time, I’m going to get a new Teensy, install it in the Genesis, and program it to control the connections via USB MIDI control (likely with some simple transistor work).

Almost there!