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Emulation (Games) Classic Games (Games)

Glitch Art 48

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."
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Glitch Art

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:18PM (#10395598)
    I have an inherent dislike for glitch art. It instantly brings about feelings of failure and hopelessness (probably due to my NES being old and busted).

    Perhaps if he used the glitch art to make something more meaningful, then it would not seem so depressing to me.
    • No kidding, I renember playing contra with my friend and they kept thinking I had slow-mo on when we fought that big boss with the swinging arms. Eventually the rambo guys would slowly become large blocks of gibbly gook.
      • I always liked slowdown in 2D games. It always seems to happen at the most action packed moments, thus making them dramatic. Metal Slug 1 on Saturn all the way.
    • Maybe you could make an animated GIF to capture the "flashing screen of death" due to a bad cartridge contact on the front-load NES. That would be annoying.
  • Windows (Score:5, Funny)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:20PM (#10395612)
    Hmm there must be some way to make a Microsoft Windows joke in this article.
  • by Disposable Rob ( 806435 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:39PM (#10395836)
    It reminds me of some really bad Trapper Keeper designs from the 80s.
  • by beeglebug ( 767468 ) * on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:45PM (#10395908)
    and I like the theory behind it, but that stuff is not even that visualy interesting. Especially seeing as the auther freely admits to heavily photoshopping it before posting.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    The results are fantastic.

    Um. Yeah.

    It's people with low standards like you that cause people like Britney Spears and all these other lame asses in both movies and music to become so popular.
  • Yar's Revenge anybody?
  • mismunch! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lysander ( 31017 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:52PM (#10396004)
    Also check out mismunch [jwz.org] 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...

  • Museum (Score:2, Funny)

    by jmole ( 696805 )
    Indiana Jones: "They belong in a museum!"
    Panama Hat Man: "So do you!"
  • by wikthemighty ( 524325 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @12:54PM (#10396021)
    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 [atariage.com] 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 [treewave.com]
    • 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.
    • 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.

  • by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @01:07PM (#10396245) Journal
    This is the Video Game equvilant of abstract art. It's all downhill from here folks!

  • Overclock your video card. You get all kinds of neat artifacts on the screen. Or, use a bad video driver.
  • Something similar. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vitaflo ( 20507 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @01:37PM (#10396651) Homepage
    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 [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.
  • Seriously, this would make some great wallpaper. They got some commercial potential there. Then you could wallpaper a whole room with it and call it the "Atari room." Have your kids go in so they can see what it was like to play games on an Atari 2600 console. Hey, it could be the punishment room. They would have to go in there for a time-out period and suffer the large blocky graphics while the images are burnt into thier retinas with large floodlights.
    MUWHAHAHA!
  • Hard Boiled (Score:5, Funny)

    by aminorex ( 141494 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @02:17PM (#10397138) Homepage Journal
    Emulator glitch works I've seen are a pale foreshadowing of the real meat of glitch art: Mpeg-4 artifacts. I've got an AVI of the Hong Kong classic movie, Hard Boiled, with just over 3 minutes of continuous multimedia glitchtasia that feels like a 500 ug LSD trip played back at 200x.
    It's the visual equivalent of the brilliant remix of Space Oddity that resulted from my first buggy fixed-point implementation of MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio for PPC 1.0 a few years ago.

  • I have an old RISC OS 3. One time I discovered that I could make it screw up y setting a wallpaper in a particular way. It was something like just making a 1x1 image and tiling it. The screen went really slowly and wouldn't flush properly. You could move windows around, but they'd still be visible where they used to be, and where they'd gone through as well.

    You could get some really neat things like that.
  • I remember a spot (years ago) about an artist who would use a certain art program, I believe it was on an Amiga, and he would purposely kill the machine, (it may have been with a virus,) and the resulting images were quite fantastic. I can't say for sure, but I think it was on PBS or something similar. Can't find a reference to it for the life of me.
  • by thrash242 ( 697169 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @05:56PM (#10399335)
    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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.

  • by Pluvius ( 734915 ) <pluvius3&gmail,com> on Thursday September 30, 2004 @06:13PM (#10399473) Journal
    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 [somethingawful.com] exploiting the weird sounds that an NES Game Genie makes. Not exactly the same thing, but very close.

    Rob
  • atari 2600 (Score:1, Interesting)

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

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