I circuit bent a Sega Genesis for MIDI-controlled glitch visuals. I can hook it up to a DAW or MIDI sequencer and then glitch out a game in sync with music.
I put this together a few years ago, but had some questions about it, so I cracked open the game system to show how it works. All I’ve done is set up some places to short out the VRAM, where the Genesis stores the sprites for the graphics. Then I added an Arduino to control when it short them out (triggered by MIDI).
Keep in mind that not all Genesis systems are the same, they have different board revisions, so your Genesis might have things in different places.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).